English as a Second Language

A coffee cart was travelling down the mountain,
in the yellow shape of an ice-cream coupe it travelled,
a cappuccino on wheels.
                                         And we followed, speaking
of this American teenager who was sent
to remedial English, since he spoke more Tagalog.
An American in remedial!
His military parents had been deep
in the Asian preoccupation. When he came back
on a visit, it was in the splendid blues

of their Marine Corps, wowing all the teachers.
We recalled the Australian boy who comprehended
nothing much, till his mother, called in to help,
was heard talking fluently with him in a baby talk
they had never abandoned. They were off a farm
deeper in the mountains. A bit like the Georgian

who sat in the back of his class for one whole year
getting no English, substituting his fists for it
till he was a State champ. Unlike the Hong Kong boy who
returned to class with slim briefcase and pinstripe
having successfully saved a million of family
investments in court before lunchtime recess.

They rise up from then, Widow and Camel Driver,
now forty-fives and fifties, whom the teacher
taught to prepare and cook their halal pilaff;
they break-danced for her after midday prayers
and spoke of a friend sniped with an ack-ack gun
who vanished in red spray at his brother’s shoulder.

It was a time of teenagers coaxed to go
back to such boulevards. And of helicopters
But! But! But! that sent boys scrambling
into their chair tunnels.
                                       And we drove on down
at just the speed which made our tyres buzz
like the small wheels of a bed that would divide us.