Teesta Review: A Journal of Poetry, Volume 5, Number 2. November 2022. ISSN: 2581-7094
Political Music Halls[1]
my head is full of earworms
about joey kangaroos
lost in zoos
old man emus
rhymes about a bearded man
(from a place called ironbark)
in nasopharyngeal pitch
song of Brumby Jacks
i am indoctrinated by
(& inoculated against)
sing-alongs about both empty
and overpopulated lands
yet the marching songs, the hymns,
operatic instrumentation
resuscitate my unpatriotic heart
the song of australia blends
with ode to motherland[s]
nationalistic fever
induced by perfect fourths
major sixths
if forced to sing daily anthems
i’d choose to become a Kiwi-German
the
haka (version) and classic haydn
it’s not impossible for me to become
either
or both.
but i don’t have to be a patriot to sing a
nation building song
i don’t have to build
or sing at all because
the band will always play waltzing matilda.
Do We Vet For Culture?
One
day, I will be the elder
a
grandmother who may be asked
“in
the olden days, when you were Chinese …
when
you had the linguistic abilities of another
how
did you lose your mother tongue?”
I
will struggle to explain why
so
many others speak it,
studied
it diligently in the classrooms
adopted
it through marriage and travel
for
business and emigration
yet
I remain a functional illiterate in
that
tongue was never really mine.
It’s
not a tongue that’s in danger of drying out
and
my real tongue will be preserved by
descendants
of less self-hating sojourners in
territories
too proud to assimilate
A
southern culture that was never really mine.
One
day, I will be the elder
a
grandmother who might be asked
“in
the olden days, when you were Australian…
how
is it that you were Other when all you were and
all
you knew was English?”
When
that day comes, I will respond in
traditional
Kylie and sing
“Je
nais sais pas pouquoir!”
[1] The Song of Australia
and Ode to Motherland are thought of by some as the second national anthems of
Australia and China respectively.