lingua franca

You said you used to hate our common tongue
before we met. But we have no other, so
you call it back from books abandoned
in earlier days. You’re better than you know,

improvising verbs that disagree
with subject words we pilfered from another
language to begin with. Your previous dislike
did not keep this language out altogether.

Should we part, I wonder if in anger
you would throw this language out again,
like the belongings of a lover no longer.
Boxes left to fall apart in the rain.

Yet this is not my language either,
except that history foisted it on me and
I claimed it out of need, as you do now.
I didn’t have the luxury of making a stand

against it as you did. And so, for you
this language is linked to me, and sometimes
monolingual strangers are shocked I wield
their language well enough to write these rhymes.