Code Talkers

Years ago our Navajo friend Hosteen Tsiniginni

Told us of how he confounded the enemy

Using a language unwritten,

Unknow beyond the deserts of his home—

Words familiar only to the wind

That twists around the branches of the pinons

On the plateaus, sweeps into the canyons,

And rushes to the sacred mountaintops,

Leaving nothing on the air

But whoosh and ssss

And soft gutteral word

Followed by short puffs of warm sound.

It was the one code that

Could not be broken.

It appears now that we are code talkers, too,

With ourselves as the enemy,

Using words to confuse and distract,

To mask the meaning of what we say

So that syllables sit on our tongues

Like polite dinner guests

Who are on the verge of vomiting

But tell the hostess again and again

How much they enjoyed

The veal parmesan.

It has taken us years to learn the words

But we have become the world’s

best code talkers,

our success matched only

by that of Hosteen Tsinniginni

and his kin.

We speak a language having nothing to do

With what we feel, becoming more and more

Adept at the one code

That cannot be broken.

by Carla Chlouber © Chlouber Estate