A Flair for Language
She wasn’t easy, is a thing we say
about someone we love. My father
says this about his mother. Grandmother’s
words could cut you from the far side
of a room, well into her last years.
The expressions on her face were widely
reported. It wasn’t necessarily the content
of the opinion, although, it was sometimes,
but how it was packaged and delivered
to your door. One might say she had a flair
for language, if it was a Trini ole-talking.
Which is why I had little choice but to laugh,
one of the last times I saw her,
lustrous as velvet in her dark brown flesh,
recalling me, under the glare of early dementia,
as a lovely little darkie, in a more fragile
voice than the one bellowing into my girlhood,
Fatty-Fatty-Boom-Boom. Her smile hanging
off the long vowel, like a cat’s tail, upturned
to the moon. You see; it’s a miracle I still love
rhyme, the coincidence of language and time.
Copyright © 2022 by Omotara James. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on August 10, 2022, by the Academy of American Poets.
“Language is a rascal. If you attempt to pin it down or restrict it, it might elude you. Attempt to charm it, it might strike back. Examine it from a distance, and watch it run straight into your arms. The fluidity of speech is such that its meaning is ultimately defined by the speaker. The capacity of language to be continually redefined is its own epic. Language is sublimely cultural. Its lyric is derived from world history, alongside personal narrative; it is enriched by intimacy. Observing the rules of language can be as interesting as ignoring them. It was a rush to write this poem. The particularity of the family functions as a delicate syntax. Sometimes your language reminds you from where and whom you hail. Other times, it confronts you with it.”
—Omotara James
Omotara James
