Search For My Tongue is about the author's struggle to find her "mother tongue." In English, tongue refers to both the physical organ used for speech and the language we speak with it. In this poem the poet writes about her tongue in both ways at once. When you say you lost your tongue, it usually means you do not know what to say, but the poet suggest you can lose your tongue in the physical sense as well. She says if you live somewhere where you use only your "foreign tongue", your mother tongue will "rot and die in your mouth." At the start of the poem, she is struggling to find her mother tongue, but at the end everything becomes clear as she finds it again.

The poet is "half-English" half Pakistani in Presents From My Aunt In Pakistan. She receives gifts of beautiful clothes and...