A Slip of the Tongue

Dialect of my mother -

oozed from rain-sodden currents in Derry’s Foyle,

sailed from Irish Sea into River Mersey.

Windswept, weathered, sing-song notes.

Meltwater brogue of bogs, fairies and goblins,

smoky with whiskey, cigarettes and bacon, drawled around peat fires.

Tempered, fighting in wild lands and wilder streets,

tales of long-dead, ever-present Troubles.

A bitter marriage let loose her lips in Liverpool,

riven with gin and tobacco,

her coughed-up cadence

rooted in me.

In Somerset, my guttural sounds evaporate,

easy as mists on the Levels,

flattened like sea-salted marshes,

into a twang of mud-soft notes that dip and rise.

This mix of burr and buttercup vowels

among cider-thick tongues like acid on limestone,

jiggle through gorse and moss,

circle orchard’s lias stone walls.

Still, the north lurks, sedimented, marbled.

A slip of the tongue in my mouth,

un-snared.

All revealing.