Lingua — Franca

Its beauty is utility: a rope bridge over a gorge, a splint on a broken leg, a key that turns in a hundred different locks, none of them its own.

Lingua franca is the tongue of the in-between — the airport lounge, the trade route, the broken elevator, the help desk at three a.m., the peace treaty signed in a borrowed alphabet.

It is not beautiful, not in the way Italian is beautiful, or the precise cruelty of German, or the musical lilt of Yoruba.

It is imperfect by design: verbs stripped of their subjunctive dreams, nouns abandoned in the wrong gender, accents smoothed down like stones in a river.

Lingua franca is the language of strangers becoming temporary friends, of orders given and understood without loyalty, of survival dressed in a few hundred words.

Here’s a short piece titled — written as a reflective prose poem. Lingua Franca