Monday, February 14, 2022

New Poetry by Jeremy Nathan Marks










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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