"We know how to sing the same songs."
A poem about language and hope
I feel like we’re due for another update on my language-learning progress. This is maybe my favorite update so far.
[Audio is back! I had to switch browsers to get a halfway-decent recording, and it’s worth it; I really like reading aloud for you.]
SPANISH EXERCISES AS AFFIRMATIONS 2025 Hablamos las mismas lenguas. Do we, though? I only know one tense so far, so everything you tell me is a declaration. I speak; you speak; sometimes te entiendo, sometimes you nudge me gently in the language I know best. Lenguas diferentes, but also, I’m learning, las mismas, the same. Sabemos cantar las mismas canciones. Oh, please let this be true; sing one of your songs and believe I will be humming harmony before you start the second verse. Sí, toco la guitarra un poco, I can follow your chords, can take my turn to lead that Dylan song, tú sabes cuál, the one that crossed the border long ago. Estamos en la misma estación. A busy station, trains and buses under way in all directions; here we are together in the same place in the same moment, making plans. ¿Viajamos a lugares diferentes? Or, my nearly-stranger dear ones, ¿por qué no tomamos el mismo tren? Then we can travel together, cantando, all the songs we know.
I wrote this poem in the spring of this year, after realizing how cheerful and befriended I felt while working through a certain Spanish lesson. Not surprising; as it presented a particular bit of grammar, the lesson was also making a lot of assertions about what’s The Same, about the ways that we (any old nosotros, any collection of humans trying to talk to one another) are The Same. Speaking in a language not my own about things that are The Same was an unspoken reminder of how Sameness and Diversity coexist, how they grow into and out of each other. Somos diferentes; somos los mismos. ¡Milagroso! Easy to celebrate in short declarative sentences, inside a thousand-word vocabulary; less easy to live all the way into, most days. Not unlike learning another language; things just keep getting more and more complicated. That’s not bad, it’s just … well, true. And it requires patience.
Speaking of complications and patience, while this poem waited its turn I’ve been introduced to the future and past preterite tenses, with which I hope someday to have a working relationship; also I’ve had a chance to polish up the poem’s last four lines, which took as long to get right as the rest of it put together. Y aquí está, and I hope it gives you to think about some Sameness that you’ve experienced in some unexpected way. Tell a story about that in the Comments, if you’d like to. Complicated stories welcome; so are short declarative sentences.
I was an exchange student in Japan one summer long, long ago. My host family did not speak English and I did not (do not) speak Japanese. However, my host father knew old show tunes and a favorite memory of mine is of the two of us belting away in the train stations. :)
Elizabeth, this is beautiful. I have a lovely colleague who is patiently teaching me one Spanish phrase per day. She writes it down on a Post-It Note and teaches me how to pronounce it beautifully. The first one read:
*Todo bien*