The speaker describes living with two languages, and they could hardly be more different. The first is the mother tongue of the title. It lives under the skin, almost like a pulse, and it was passed down in an intimate, quiet moment, "a night of hushed love-making." It is the language of waiting, of dreams, and strangely, of a death wish. Even the language of belonging carries a darker undertone.
The second language is harder to name. It stays in the shadows and only makes itself known deep in the night. When the speaker is attacked, imagined as an axe piercing the body and guts spilling out, the scream comes in this language, not the first.
The poem suggests that the language we inherit and the one that comes out of us in real agony may not be the same. The mood is tense and unsettling, moving from soft intimacy to raw violence. It leaves us wondering which language is truly the speaker's own.