Latin

Sometimes, loving you is like Latin,
unwieldy conjugations and rabbit-hole verbs.
It is hard to lose myself in the task of translating
the hard syllables between us when what I’d rather do
is believe the language outdated, barely useful, overly complex,
a haughty echo of what is surely impossible to speak out loud.

And yet there is that other Latin. Solid armature of history
fortressing the walls of this new, wild dialect,
the peninsula I cling to even in my darkest, thrashing hour,
the origin of almost every word I need to know.