#napowrimo Day 12 - “Flat ‘a’”

Hey, lovely people. Today is Day 12 of National Poetry Month and the prompt is to write a poem about a very small thing. Here’s my poem:

Day 12 - FLAT “A”

By Farah Lawal Harris

‘tis a little thing indeed,

a flat “a.”

so commonplace in the English language—

see! i just used one in the “lang” of “language.’

say my name

and you just used one, too:

“Farah”

“Fa” rhyming with “cat,” “bat,”

“sad,” “bad,” “man,” “trap.’

not to be confused with a long “a,”

like “racist” or “made” or “erasure.”

lately, when i hear my name,

i hear erasure

of my parents’ Yoruba tongues,

erasure of the six days i lived

before my naming ceremony on the seventh;

how my name was borne out of my mother’s grief:

“Farah” short for the Arabic name, “Farahat,”

meaning joy,

neither flat nor long.

lately, when i meet a new person,

i tell them

to pronounce my name how my parents intended,

not “Farah” like “Farrah Fawcett,”

not “Farah” like “rhymes with Sarah”

but “Far-ah” like “far,”

like “do-me-ri-fa-”

so foreign it sounds to my ears

coming from American tongues.

so far away is the day

when someone at school or the neighborhood

rebranded my name with a flat “a”

before i had the awareness to notice it had changed,

before i made a conscious decision to assimilate.

‘tis a small thing indeed,

a flat ‘a.’