From the tunnels they need to come home
From the damaged mountains come home
From the hole in the future come home
From the ruined city
From the last act before the de'nouement
Come home
From the flooded trailer park
From everything that happened
That made grandpa die of a broken heart
Just come home
From the empty shadows
From the garden of ivory flowers
From out of the door at the end of the narrow hall
Come home everyone
From along the jagged shore
From floating in smoke
From feeling farther and farther away
Come home.
At the moment of receiving sentence
From languishing in sodden tents
Come home
Come home from a thousand years of hearing the door lock
Come home
From believing that life doesn't matter
Come home from searching for someone who speaks your language
Come home
From not being able to escape the smell of death
Come home everyone
Just come home
......................
"garden of ivory flowers" from a poem by W.S. Merwin
.......
Reflection:
I have a friend who calls poems like this "list poems". For me when they work, like this one, it is because it works like steps in the sense of a stairway, up or down or first down and then up, but also steps in the sense of footprints that lead somewhere. The idea is to write myself out of stasis. The title line is a paraphrase from an article for BBC World quoting someone in Israel who is expressing a collective attitude of running out of patience. Of course everyone who was taken hostage should come home. None of this should have happened in the first place. But this poem is about how we all need to come home. We are all hostages in a world where individual autonomy is almost totally an illusion, where each one of us could, at any moment fall prey to acts of terrible violence which happen with virtually no warning almost randomly. Where / how / when does it end? Coming home is coming home to ourselves, to each other, so our senses, to sanity, to conscience, to our humanity, to a fresh start.
(Article changed on Nov 22, 2023 at 6:38 PM EST)
(Article changed on Nov 25, 2023 at 9:12 AM EST)
(Article changed on Nov 25, 2023 at 1:31 PM EST)
(Article changed on Nov 25, 2023 at 2:32 PM EST)
