Poem: My Mother’s Tongue

My first language was my mother’s hands,

lifting rice to my lips,

braiding stories into my hair,

pressing warmth into my small shoulders

as she whispered a Tagalog lullaby

I would never learn to sing.

My tongue, unrooted from its home,

stumbled over syllables too thick,

too foreign for school halls lined with whiteness.

I watched my mother’s words shrink inside her,

watched her trade them for English,

for safety, for belonging that never came.

“Speak properly,” they told me.

So I cut my tongue in half—

one side for them,

one side left behind in the mouths of my ancestors,

buried beneath the shame of mispronounced vowels.

Mano—

a ritual once sacred,

bowing my head to the hands of my elders,

a touch that tethered me to centuries of reverence,

became something I hesitated to show

outside the walls of our home.

The color of my skin,

the lilt of my parents’ voices,

the scent of garlic and vinegar on our clothes—

all things I learned to hide,

all things I wished, as a child,

could disappear beneath the veil of white acceptance.

I was taught to unsee myself,

to laugh when they mispronounced my name,

to erase the accent before it could betray me.

My history, a shadow I dragged behind me,

longing to be light enough to belong.

But history does not disappear.

My mother’s tongue still lingers

in the way she calls my name when she is tired,

in the prayers she hums under her breath,

in the hands she presses to my forehead

when no one else is watching.

I am learning to bow my head again,

to pick up the words I once abandoned,

to let my name sit full in my mouth,

to love the skin that carries the sun in its depths.

The mother tongue is not lost—