My tongue is often awkward. It trips over both consonants and vowels, pulls words that should be simple into sounds that suddenly perform an alienness even I don't understand. We may be fluent in certain languages but clueless in others, though they create a reassuring ripple around us. At the bakery where the breads and rice cakes of my childhood are heaped in neat rows behind glass, I hear words in Bisaya (which I don’t know except for the lilt) and Ilocano (which I do speak), threaded through more ubiquitous Tagalog. And of course, American. I can tell the excitement on the faces of children pointing out sweets, the pretend pain of the auntie paying for two full bags at the register presided over by a miniature Santo Niño. So many coins offered at the feet of God, who in this incarnation is a child himself. Centuries ago he would have been one of 14,000 innocents slaughtered, whose mothers mourned them in a carol: Lully, lullah, / thou little tiny child/ Bye bye, lully, lullay/ Thou little tiny child.
Purveyors of fine poetry since 2003.
I never knew the history behind that carol.