Lingua Franca
My language languishes:
it neither scampers nor frisks;
it executes no back-flips,
no handstands, no moonwalks;
it does not somersault; it does not pirouette;
it neither pounces like the cobra
nor springs like the yearling lamb.
I want that lithe and limber idiom,
that sassy brassy palaver,
that red-stiletto dialect,
that margarita-mother-tongue
with the salted rim,
spectacular vernacular,
slang with a bang;
I want blab, blurt, yawp, yelp,
hoot, howl, holler,
the lingua franca
of bump and tussle and nudge.
To Seamus Heaney’s way of thinking, poetry was about providing that “extra voltage in the language, the intensity, the self-consciousness” that raises thought to another level. Often, we experience that intensity through its sounds, its musicality – and this is true even in contemporary poems that sometimes pose as normal speech. So it didn’t surprise me to learn that, when Thomas DeFreitas was 15 and he heard the great Irish poet read at Boston College, the event became a catalyst for him and helped make his love for poetry “all-consuming and irreversible.” An emerging talent at work on his first full-length manuscript, Thomas’ writing has appeared in a number of journals like Dappled Things, Ibbetson Street, Muddy River Poetry Review, and Plainsongs. His desire for the richness and complexity of experience that words can bring to us is abundantly on display in this boisterous fanfare of a poem – the lingua franca, perhaps, with which all our roving hearts converse.