Answer

The poem opens with a question which deals with the theme of identity. The question says that the speaker has been asked what he means when he says he have lost his tongue. The voice/speaker in the poem responds to the question with another question: what would you do if you had two tongues in your mouth? This is perhaps asking the question, what would you do if you could speak two languages, but lost your main language (‘the other tongue’) and now could only speak the second one, the ‘foreign tongue’.