Zephyr of thee

📜 The Prophet of Lost Languages 📜

Poem by Nandan A R

They say I began babbling before birth,
in a tongue my mother never knew.
She felt me kick in Sanskrit syllables,
hiccup in Phoenician,
and sigh in something older than breath.

At three, I whispered bedtime stories
in tongues that tasted of ash and cinnamon—
Aramaic lullabies,
Etruscan fables with no ending.
My father called a priest;
my mother called it poetry.

By school I’d grown quieter,
learning the right words—
the authorized, the modern, the English—
but still, in dreams,
I dined with deities no one remembers,
drinking from clay cups
etched with extinct alphabets.

I became a librarian of the unspeakable.
Every lost language found me:
the forest-laced vowels of the Ainu,
the sand-heavy breath of Ubykh,
a kiss of Cornish rain
on the back of my neck in July.

And each came bearing ghosts.

One wore a sari stitched with Urdu verses
untranslatable to the living.
Another held a violin carved
from the bones of her vanished village,
and played a lullaby that made the moon weep.

They did not ask me to revive them—
only to remember.

Now, I speak softly.
On buses, to pigeons, in my sleep.
Not sermons, no.
I’ve stopped calling myself prophet.

Just witness.
Just voice.

Because somewhere, someone
still hears a word in their blood
they cannot name—
and wonders
if they are mad
or merely ancient.

---

✨ A featured poem by Nandan A R — curated for ThePoetyfy ✨

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