You are going mute: your tongue refuses
to remember the shrill sounds of your mother tongue –
where the dead letters join to create live sentences
your ancestors fought to preserve.
It is lonely here in this white man’s land –
there is laughter of children in cork city;
they speak the coloniser’s language freely.
Yet you sit in silence; your mind is slowly forgetting
what it is like to say I love you in Sinhalese.
You wanted salvation from being oppressed,
moving to the west liberated you. Yet for a better life,
you are forgetting how to say grace in your native language.
You wanted rescuing for your soul, your identity.
But your tongue is refusing to speak.
To not speak in your language, your ancestors fought for, is devastation.
You sit in silence, as you wait to be freed to speak
in your mother tongue – if not for you then for others.
Migrants who do not have community to speak
in their native tongue. Those who are lonely.
You cannot remember how to bind the syllables of your language together:
You are forgetting how to say butterfly,
how to praise the heavens,
how to keen your dead;
how to say goodbye to your mother,
one last time.