Lost Languages

 

A verse for a verse,

We conversed on the sly—

Songbirds of separate skies, 

Wings aflutter on a new rhyme.

 

I’d rather love more, said Auden

As did I, but you insisted

On measure and kind

 

 

All protest muffled in the vastness of a sigh.

 

There is a village in Turkey

Where people speak a secret tongue

Made of whistles that glide over hills:

To the outsider,
Sweet bird calls fill the air.

 

To the local,

Question meets answer,

Greetings get exchanged, 

Plans are made,
Invites extended,
Ayes and nays. 

 

Your friends never understood

Our language of entanglement

Mine mocked metaphors that muddled meaning:

 

To the outsider,
A cipher on the back of a riddle.

 

To the lover,

A new dictionary,

Confession and reciprocation,

Rupture of rules in daylight
A continent-crossing embrace

In plain sight.

 

They say the language of whistles is in danger,

Few know the tunes that sail through trees

Now there is UNESCO: labels, ads, cameras at the ready

Listen! The hills yet again whistle—through aching teeth.

 

But who saves the language of lovers

When the lovers cease to speak?

Who remembers the bloodsong of a shared heart

 

When it shatters into a thousand villages?

 

Sumeet is a writer, photographer and editor. His words have appeared in Travel + Leisure India & South Asia, Harper's Bazaar India, Outlook Traveller, Viator, Kunzum, and The Times of India. He is currently working on his first novel, A Flight of Swallows. Haunted by the impermanence of things and the malleability of memory, his poems and photographs make vailant attempts at preservation.