Author’s Note

In Borrowed Tongue was born from that strange kind of love that feels both sacred and undeserved—a devotion to a land and a people whose history my own ancestors helped scar. It’s a reckoning with inherited guilt, but also an offering of respect, grief, and yearning. I wrote this after dreaming of the Philippines—a place I’ve never touched, yet feel tied to in ways I can’t explain. The poem speaks from that space between love and apology, where language fails but the heart keeps trying to make amends. This isn’t an attempt to absolve; it’s an attempt to listen, to understand, and to love more humbly, in borrowed tongue.

In Borrowed Tongue
Poetry by Rowan Evans

I had a dream about   
a land across the sea.   
Seven thousand islands—   
feel like home to me.   
   
I’ve never set foot there,   
never walked upon the shore   
but something calls to me.   
It speaks in a tongue,   
I do not know but I—   
feel it in my soul.   
   
But I’m white,   
the color of the colonizers   
they had to fight.   
   
It’s a history,   
that wasn’t taught to me,   
I had to learn it on my own.   
And I’m sick.   
Sick to my fucking stomach,   
the way people   
that look like me   
never act like me.   
Consumed by greed,   
and the need to erase a culture.   
   
It’s my people’s history,   
and yet we—   
not me,   
but the collective we,   
like to spin it.   
   
Make ourselves look like the heroes,   
but we’ve never been,   
we’re always the villain.   
   
So I apologize in borrowed tongue—   
Ikinalulungkot ko ang ginawa ng aking mga tao.
   
How I wish I could change it,   
rewrite every wrong with my pen.   
The same one I write love letters   
to a country I’m in love with.   
   
But I can’t and it kills me.
Now I’m wishing I could 
peel the skin off my back
change the color I was born in.

Closing Note

I leave these words here, softly, like a breath across the islands I have never touched. Not to fix what cannot be fixed, but to feel it, to honor it, to love it in the only way I can—with my pen, my heart, and a quiet apology that lingers long after the last line.