“lost my tongue”
Line 2 (anthology page 54)
The phrase that starts the poem is an idiom: to lose your tongue normally means to be unable, for a moment, to think of anything to say. The speaker means something far larger, the loss of a whole language, and the listener’s question in line 1 suggests they heard only the everyday meaning. Bhatt uses that gap to launch her extended metaphor. Because a tongue is part of the body, losing it sounds like an injury, even a mutilation, and the possessive my makes the language part of who she is. Everything that follows answers the question of what she meant, so the whole poem can be read as an explanation of these three words.
“two tongues”
Line 4 (anthology page 54)
The speaker turns the question back on the listener and asks them to picture a mouth with two tongues in it. The image is deliberately strange, almost grotesque, and that is its point: it makes bilingualism feel crowded and physical rather than abstract, and it forces a listener who may speak only one language to imagine an experience they have never had. The number matters too. Once there are two, there is a contest, and the poem is built as that contest: first one tongue wins, then the other. Notice that line 4 still addresses you. The speaker has not yet admitted that this is her own mouth.
“rot and die”
Line 13 (anthology page 54), completing the “rot” that ends line 12
The mother tongue is imagined as living tissue that decays if it is not used. The word “rot” ends line 12 and begins line 13, a repetition across the line break that slows the reader down and makes the decay feel gradual and unstoppable, and the heavy monosyllables add to the weight. The conditional grammar of lines 10 to 14 presents all this as the inevitable result of living where you must speak a foreign tongue, which is exactly the assumption the rest of the poem overturns. The disgust is intentional: the mouth, the place of speech, becomes a place of decay. The images of rot here are answered one by one by images of growth in lines 31 to 38.
“spit it out”
Lines 14 and 15 (anthology page 54)
The phrase appears twice, and the difference between the two is the poem’s turning point. In line 14 it is still hypothetical: this is what you would have to do. In line 15 it is confession: she thought she had done it. Spitting is a violent, disgusted act of rejection, which suggests that the pressure to fit in made her treat her own language as something foul. There is an irony in the idiom too, since “spit it out” is what you say to someone who will not tell you what they mean, and she has just been asked what she means. One further reading: line 15 uses “spit”, not spat, as its past tense, the form more common in North American English. At the very moment she describes spitting out Gujarati, her grammar may be showing the foreign tongue she has absorbed.
“stump of a shoot”
Line 31 (anthology page 55), the first line after the Gujarati
This is the first English after the Gujarati, and the tongue has become a plant. A stump is what is left when something is cut down, which recalls the lost and spat-out tongue of the first section: it was cut back, but not destroyed. A shoot is new growth. Together the two nouns turn an image of amputation into one of pruning, the cutting back that makes a plant grow again. The phrase is small and tentative, a stump rather than a flower, so the recovery starts modestly before it gathers pace. Line 31 begins with a lower-case letter, carrying on the sentence broken off at the end of line 16, so grammatically the regrowth is what the dream produces.
“grows”
Lines 31 and 32 (anthology page 55), four times
The verb appears four times in two lines, each time with a new result: the tongue returns, lengthens, becomes wet with life, and develops veins. The repetition at the start of each phrase, in a list with no conjunctions, creates speed, as if the growth were filmed and played back fast. The additions matter. Moisture means life, the opposite of the decaying tongue of line 13. Veins belong to both leaves and bodies, so the image fuses the plant and the tongue: sap and blood at once. The present tense makes the regrowth happen as we read, and the contrast with the slow, dragging repetition of “rot” in lines 12 and 13 could hardly be sharper.
“the other tongue in knots”
Line 33 (anthology page 55)
The returning tongue ties English up, and the image reverses an idiom: to be tongue-tied is to be unable to speak freely. Now it is the foreign tongue that is tongue-tied and the mother tongue that is free. The words “the other” point back to line 6, where the other was the language she could not fully know. The label has not changed, but the power has: the tongue that once crowded out the first is now being bound by it. Knots suggest the twisting stems of a climbing plant, but also a struggle, and this is where the ending stops sounding peaceful. Is the mother tongue returning, or taking revenge? A strong answer can argue that the poem imagines only victory and defeat, never sharing.
“the bud opens”
Line 34 (anthology page 55), said twice in the line
The phrase is repeated within the line, and the repetition slows the moment down, like someone watching a flower open and hardly believing it. A bud opening is a traditional image of beauty and new life, and it transforms the mouth: in the first section the mouth was where language decayed, and now it is where language flowers. The line ends with the bud inside her own mouth. In the first section the mouth was always yours (lines 4 and 13); here and in line 38 it is always hers. The speaker has moved from explaining to a listener to describing her own body, and from the general case to herself.
“blossoms out of my mouth”
Line 38 (anthology page 55), the last line of the anthology’s section
The section ends on flowering, the opposite of the rot of line 13, so the poem’s two key images frame it: decay at the start, blossom at the end. The words “out of my mouth” matter as much as the verb. The flower does not stay inside her; it comes out, as speech does, so the image suggests she is speaking her mother tongue again, not only dreaming it. But the sentence it ends describes something that happens again and again, not once. The blossoming is a pattern, not a single victory, and each time it is preceded by the belief that the language has gone. The most convincing reading of the ending is therefore resilient rather than triumphant: the mother tongue will keep coming back, and the speaker will keep fearing that it will not.