If I asked a Frenchman, who spoke naught but French,
Or a Spaniard who spoke only Spanish,
What word they would use to limn me in a pinch
If all other languages vanished

Would they pick a word that I had never heard
An equivalent of in my native tongue?
And how would I know, as comparisons go,
That the word that I chose was an equal one?

Was it just pure fate that the words we create
Fit so perfectly in different types of speech?
Or rather, how could we tell if the words that we spell
Truly have bilingual reach?

Did a person in Versailles look up to the sky
And remark that it looked quite “bleu”
While a guy in Chiang Mai did concurrently decide
That “mxkhr?m” was the word he would use?

I don’t know the response to these sorts of questions
But I’m sure if I did I would say
That if the answers were out there, in someone’s possession,
It wouldn’t really matter anyway