Respond

What My Mother Prayed in the Other Language

by Nadia Osei — the poem does not scroll away while you write about it.

The poem

She prayed in the language I was taught to lose,soft in the kitchen, before the six o'clock news.I never learned the words, only the tune.

I told myself it was a fair thing to choose —one country's grammar for another's view.She prayed in the language I was taught to lose.

I catch it still in traffic, in the bluesa stranger hums that sounds like something true.I never learned the words, only the tune.

My daughter asks what god we don't refuse,and I have no verse to hand her, no clear cue.She prayed in the language I was taught to lose.

Maybe faith was never in the words I'd use,but in a woman certain no one knew.I never learned the words, only the tune.

So let this stand for what I could not choose:she prayed in the language I was taught to lose.I never learned the words, only the tune.

The poet asked for: My first villanelle. Be honest about the fourth stanza — I'm not sure the refrain is earning its keep by then.

Full page, with the responses

Already said

Ilse Brandt2026-09-20

You picked the hardest refrain to sustain — "only the tune" risks going slack by the third repetition, and you keep it alive by changing what surrounds it every time: traffic, a stranger's blues, a daughter's question. That's the correct villanelle instinct. My one note is the quatrain's third line repeats "She prayed" verbatim where the form allows the refrain to carry slightly more weight on its own; right now it reads a half-step too literal after four stanzas of earned restraint.