A Third Voice
From the seam between two tongues, a new poetic voice is born that belongs to neither
Then, one grey morning, the silence between my languages at last began to speak.
A line arrived that belonged to neither tongue and yet could not have come from only one.
It rose in me like water finding a new channel through ground I had thought was solid.
The image was born in my old country, but the grammar that carried it was freshly, foreignly mine.
I did not translate this line from anywhere; it emerged, whole, from the between two worlds.
Its rhythm remembered my childhood, while its vocabulary reached forward into the life I now lived.
For the first time in years, the words did not taste of tin or of absence.
They tasted of both homes at once, a strange fruit grafted from two different and stubborn trees.
Gardeners know that the grafted branch often bears more sweetly than either parent stock alone.
So it was with this voice: , hybrid, , and more alive than anything I had written pure.
It did not ask permission of the old language or apology of the new.
It coined its own small words where neither tongue had one, and the coinages rang true.
I stopped mourning the poet I had been and began, cautiously, to greet the poet I was becoming.
This third voice was not a compromise between two losses but the of a single gain.
It belonged to the border itself, to the crossing, to the very act of moving between.
The exile's tongue, I saw, is not a poorer tongue but a doubled and more one.
Where others heard only my accent, this voice heard two musics learning, slowly, to play in tune.
It braided my grandmother's proverbs into the syntax of a city she would never see.
It let the snow of the north fall, at last, upon the orchards of the south.
Nothing in it was wasted: not the loss, not the labour, not the long of learning.
Every stumble I had suffered became, in this voice, a widening of what I could say.
The wound had not closed; it had opened into a mouth, and the mouth had begun to sing.
I understood that I had not lost one language and failed at another, but grown a third between them.
This was the country I had been searching for, the one no border guard could ever stamp.
It had no flag, no soil, no army; it had only a voice, and the voice was enough.
I wrote through that morning without stopping, as though making up for years of enforced silence.
The poem, when it was done, was unmistakably mine, and yet unlike anything I had made before.
I sealed it in an envelope, and for the first time exile felt less like an ending than a start.