Pidgin (speak white*)
Today I heard a young man
speaking in tongues
from a televised platform
in the heart of downtown
Cameras rolled banners waved
and the passion of his audience
warmed the deliverance seeking
If what the man said made sense
to those in attendance
it bewildered everyone else
but as a form of recompense
we’ve been promised an encore performance
Meanwhile a man with an eagle feather
sits on a train track in the middle of nowhere
he is accompanied by several others
beating drums singing songs in a display
the powers that be say is a threat to commerce
In this country we have two official languages
two solitudes of which “tongues” is not (yet) one
but there is a lingua franca a dialect that unites
It is called Speaking White.
- © Jeremy Nathan Marks 2022
Jeremy Nathan Marks lives in Canada. New and recent work appears/will appear in places like Flash Fiction Magazine, Garfield Lake, Expanded Field, Unlikely Stories, Ginosko Literary Journal, Wondrous Real, Microfiction Mondays, and Eastern Iowa Review. His full length poetry collection, Of Fat Dogs & Amorous Insects is published by Alien Buddha Press (2021).
* [The phrase “speak white” is apparently a racist insult used by English-speaking Canadians to shame French-speaking Canadians for speaking their language in public.- Editor]
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