“May You Be Buried With the Latin Language, German”
May you be buried
with your Latin letters,
your straight lines and borrowed pride,
your vowels cold as porcelain,
your consonants biting like bayonets.
May you sleep beneath the roots
of every tongue you tried to silence.
Let your grammar rot beside your guilt,
let your syntax tangle with forgotten screams.
You wanted to write laws,
I wanted to write lullabies.
You gave me orders in a foreign alphabet—
I answered in a silence you never learned to read.
Take your Latin.
Take your sharp-cornered power.
Wrap it in your flag,
and bury it deep
where no breath can reach.
But don’t call it a funeral.
Call it a return.
A return to earth.
A return to truth.
A return to us.
Never
will you cast a spell on me,
nor will you ruin my life
with a psychiatric diagnosis
written in Latin.
You will not name me.
Not in your tongue.
Not in your codes.
Not in your padded rooms
or polished silence.
I am not your subject.
Not your study.
Not your symptom.
Not your page.
Your Latin cannot contain me.
Your ink cannot curse me.
And your clipboard
does not carry my soul.
I name myself.
In the language they tried to erase.
In the breath of the wind.
In the scream of the mountains.
In every root
you tried to cut.