Letter from a Code Talker, 1945

Sean Sam

The enemy skin seems a similar shade,
sometimes glowing in atolls bombed
or when it flaps and droops like a flag
of flayed skull in howitzer flashes

mouth gaped, slack as the jaw of a monitor
lizard smiling, the grammar grinding teeth,
my saliva a code, more sensual
than Enigma, all vibrating hyoids.

Speaking so well and existing so Native,
Uncle Sam has granted me a guard.
Brown skin is suspicion. It is tapetum lucidum

at twilight. So surely the sunbaked corpses
reek of misgivings, and the murky modern
transport trails called territory
are on trial. If only the hell passes

and my voice again joins the gentle
talk of yours beside hoodoo spires,
never again stuttering through bunkers.
My dialect is death distorted.
Everything I am belongs to the bombs.

The commanders wish me to say
the language beaten from me.
Each time I speak another sun
drops from the abnormal sky.

I only desire at least one other
to see this endless loss and let
my words escape into their time.

So what if I was not here
but there? Gone, yet living
within this lacuna, wandering
between letters.

Let me speak.