Immersing The Deity Of Language Poem by Vinita Agrawal

IMMERSING THE DEITY OF LANGUAGE

Could you listen to your language like an outsider? As if it were not your own...
Could you filter sounds from words
like fragrance from soil
like aura from face?
Sense illumination from beneath closed eyelids? Watch lips tamp out words in a dialect you follow yet not understand a word of what was being said?
Could you...not comprehend
the words your mother blew into your baby ears like kisses and allow only silence to bob in your larynx instead,
a silence golden with the harvest of meanings?
If you could, you'd read to perfection
the hunger in your lover's eyes beyond the gibberish of speech
the padded seductive language of fingertips drumming between hard phalanges
the unscarred territory of silence not broken even by a sigh
You'd know the bliss
of forgetting the way your tongue curls around your nationality.
the bliss of bringing on the Great Deluge of quietude
uniting people with their minds
the bliss of immersing the deity of language
into a pond of blankness
and floating ashore with its soul.
*********