“No Rest Until They Learn”
I won’t rest
until every Brit,
whether sipping tea in London
or pretending to own the stars in L.A.,
has learned German.
Not tourist-German.
Not grammar-book polite.
But the weighty kind—
the kind carved by exile,
by mothers who swallow grief
between compound words
and children raised in echoes.
Let them twist their tongues
around our thunder.
Let them taste
the bite of consonants,
the dignity in every umlaut
they never cared to hear.
Let them feel the silence
in a language
that doesn’t bow.
Because for too long,
they’ve spoken
and the world answered.
They’ve commanded
and the world translated.
But I won’t.
Not anymore.
I will watch them stumble
through every sentence
until they understand
that language is not a gift
we owe them—
it is a mirror
they must finally face.