The Last Speaker of Akkala Sami

Gail White

(Marja Sergina, the last known speaker of Akkala Sami, spoken in villages

on Russia’s Kola Peninsula, died on December 26, 2003.)

I didn’t mean to let it slip away,

but when there were no reindeer to be fed

or children to be called, the words began

to fade. It was too easy just to speak

my second language. For a while I used

Akkala Sami in my prayers. I thought

it must exist because God wanted it,

so he would like to hear it. Now I know

that God can do without a lot of things:

Kola, the reindeer, all my people, me –

and when I’m gone the words will all be gone,

unless the sounds are somewhere, like the light

of long-dead stars. Not needed now, the words

will die with my own voice, and that ends that.

The last one who will hear it is my cat.

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First published in Better Than Starbucks

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Gail’s notes: “The death of this language, spoken by reindeer herders, was a story I couldn’t resist. I’ve read that recently the last speaker of the Chinese ‘language of women’ also died. The language was used mostly for the women to write poetry to each other, complaining of their hard lot in life. Here I was trying to imagine how it would feel to know that your language would never be spoken again.“

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Gail White is a formalist poet whose totem animal is the cat, as evidenced by her chapbook of cat poetry, Catechism. She lives in Breaux Bridge, Louisiana, where she currently owns two cats and feeds three others.

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The Last Speaker of Akkala Sami Gail White

The Last Speaker of Akkala Sami

Gail White