Lingua Franca Now

It is not beautiful, not in the way Italian is beautiful, or the precise cruelty of German, or the musical lilt of Yoruba.

And maybe that is enough. Because before poetry, before prayer, before the love letter and the curse, there was this: two people, no shared cradle, and the desperate, generous act of making meaning anyway. lingua franca

Here’s a short piece titled — written as a reflective prose poem. Lingua Franca It is not beautiful, not in the way

Lingua franca is the language of strangers becoming temporary friends, of orders given and understood without loyalty, of survival dressed in a few hundred words. Here’s a short piece titled — written as

It is imperfect by design: verbs stripped of their subjunctive dreams, nouns abandoned in the wrong gender, accents smoothed down like stones in a river.

It is not the language we first cried in, nor the one our mothers used to shush the night. It is not sacred, not ancestral, not carved into runestones or sung in epics.