The Foreign Language

By YaseminB

Thu, 27 Jun 2019
  • 525 reads
3 comments
 

The Foreign Language

 

Stale furnace.

Drizzling close to my skin; a silver sheath.

I had no word for drizzling of course

Not in English nor in my mother tongue.

Come to think of it.

A girl of sixteen; my future unfurnished.

Uncertain!

I boarded on the London train:

Armed with ten broken sentences.

In English.

Five of them useless:

Niggling me like in-growing toenails!

Who should I say, “where do you live?” In English!

In foreign tongue!

Not to my family! The only people I knew in this country.

I had to make friends quick!

So that I could speak!

 The foreign tongue.

So I did!

Now the foreign tongue is my mother tongue!

 

 

Certificate U
Poem
Autobiography

Comments

Submitted by onemorething on

I really like 'my future unfurnished' and that you were 'armed with ten broken sentences'. So good. I think it's all good. It lost a little something for me just in the last three lines. not sure why really, perhaps that they felt unnecessary and that ending on 'so that I could speak' would have more impact. These things are entirely subjective though, of course. It made me smile. 

 

Submitted by YaseminB on

thank youx

Yasemin Balandi

Submitted by Kurt Rellians on

I enjoyed this because I felt as if I was in your situation at that stage in your life just by reading it. The last line really clinched it for me, to understand that English became your 'mother tongue'. I feel that we can now say 'Welcome' quite easily, because you now belong!