We Play Charades

My first instinct is to translate

the word. Make it easier to understand

without saying the word itself.

I feel guilt for this mistake—

for changing languages instead

of describing. Isn’t this an easy way out?

My mother and I are playing charades

alone. We make this mistake over &

over, our tongues

too quick to learn. After all,

isn’t this what we are used to?

When one language fails,

we try the next & the next

until someone understands.

A syllable escapes like a captured cricket,

singing for its love of freedom. It is too late

to go back now, to jar the language

we first learned. We do not want to,

either, so in this game, we swallow first.

Card, swallow, describe, flip.

Card, swallow, describe, flip.

Uma Menon

Uma Menon is a writer from Winter Park, Florida. She is the author of Hands for Language (Mawenzi House, 2020) and My Mother's Tongues (Candlewick Press, 2023) and Our Mothers’ Names (Candlewick Press, 2025. Her work has appeared in the Huffington Post, The Progressive, The Massachusetts Review, and other publications. Menon was the 2019–2020 Youth Fellow for the International Human Rights Art Festival and a 2020–2021 Encore Public Voices Fellow. She currently studies at Yale Law School and has an A.B. in Public and International Affairs from Princeton University.