greek is sacred to me.

in english, there are words
    that come with the baggage
    of knowing how I once used them
    before I became stifled
    by the uncomfortable way they felt.

in english, there are words
    that feel hostile,     that have been wielded at me
    without my permission
    and turned sour and ugly;
words, perhaps fine on their own,
    but tainted by the fact that
    they once belonged to me,
    forced to reject them violently
    just to wash the memory of them off my skin.

in english, I was a girl,
but in greek,
    I was never ένα κορίτσι.

in english, there are words
    that I wear proudly like shining armor,
    defiantly,
    because I know I took them for myself
    by force,
    and they’ve made me strong
    because I know I might always need
    to defend my claim on them —
but they’ve also made me tired.

in greek, words just are.
nobody has ever snidely traded
    my αυτός with an αυτή,
nobody has ever told me
    I can’t be ένα αγόρι.
in greek, there is a vastness around me
    that I get to fill with myself
and there’s no one there to look at me
with the shapes of the wrong letters in their memory.

in english, there are words
    that create and destroy old alliances,
words heavy with all the history of me,
    and my ancestors too.

in greek, words are heavy with history too,
    but it’s someone else’s history
    and my future;
my fresh ice to tread over,
    leaving a single set of earnest footprints;
my words to claim easily as ο γιος της Αθηνά,
    the only me that greek has ever known.