Languages and Literacies

I once taught my students how to pick words up
and examine them from every angle, the way that people
fought and formed and spoke and laughed and hurled
sounds and syllables with gentle or angry tongues at one another,
using conversations to create communities,
and how actions and values, beliefs and statutes, all held hands with
ideas and claims and reasons, the camaraderie between them.
I've taught and taught years and semesters of students
who never seem to age and who always seem to look up
at me with that same uncertain, sometimes distrustful gaze,
while somewhere deep in their hearts later (hopefully)
thanking me for the directions in which I pointed them and planted them.

And yet, among the hubbub of the languages and literacies
toward which I sent them, I myself failed to pick up
on the words and choreography you laid down at my feet,
opting instead to use my own meaning to write stories of
anguish across my heart while ignoring the pain that was
written across yours.
For that, I am sorry.
For that, I promise
to stay in tune with your languages and literacies,
your sounds and syllables, so that as time grasps us in its arms
and we form a part of its own delicate dance, I will be
a native speaker of your tongue, and learn to bask
in both your silences and your celebrations, with you,
helping you form the person and communities you
wanted to be all along,
the very man I loved,
from the moment you spoke your first word to me.