Maybe This Poem Was Made to be Left Unfinished, or Abandoned.
Maybe This Poem Resembles The People And Places in It.
Maybe This Poem is Meant to be.
-1-
My earliest definition of migration/
Of forcibly but instinctively leaving one’s home/
Was the migration of birds.
6 years old sitting in class, listening
Attentively
To the teacher explaining, with a foreign accent and a heavy tongue
About the way “birds” leave their homes,
With little to no luggage except the feathers adorning their frail frames/
Forcibly
But
.
.
.
Instinctively.
I have never been bothered by the cold before.
But Winter is an unwelcome neighbor who
Comes over for coffee uninvited, every morning.
She steals my bedsheets,
Locking up the rest of the seasons on the balcony
So that summer dries up and spring withers down.
Winter messes with the channels in the TV of my imagination
And the frequencies of sanity radio in my head.
She takes control, entirely, stickily, till I lose my keys and tunes
And so I pack….
-2-
An embryo forms memories
Inside their mother’s womb.
The memories soon fade away, when the baby breathes life for the first time.
I was once an embryo,
Forming memories of the confined space I once called home
Tucked safely under my mother’s – stillwholebackthen – heart.
It must be tragic to forget your first home.
It must be blissful to forget your first home.
-3-
They say that the body is our permanent home,
That we live in, with, and within it.
They say you can escape your hometown but never your home.
And I tried.
Five times.
To sneak out with a razor
And three times with a hand
On the throat door,
Tight;
Breaking to break free.
I have tried to escape the hometown and the home,
To migrate, leaving behind the mind and dumping the soul along the way.
I have failed:
Five times with a bandage
And three with a gasp.
-4-
Oftentimes, I wonder how it feels like to live by the sea,
To be a daughter of the shore and the sand.
I wonder how it feels like to build home next to an ever-changing body.
I wonder how sweet the pain would be
if the waves didn’t remember me from the night before,
How beautiful it would be to wrap tears in a scarf from home
and send them on their own way through the sea,
To let what once belonged to me, outgrow me,
Just so I can practice expanding my love till it covers the ocean.
If the tears come back one day and lay on the shore,
Right under my window,
Would they be mine to shed again?
-5-
A butterfly is forced to abandon its home
Twice,
Migrating from the comforting embrace of the soil and leaves
To the prisoning walls of a cocoon.
Does it miss the damp kisses of the land?
Twice,
From the sheltering walls of a cocoon
To the vastness of the sky.
Does it miss the silky tickles of its bed?
A butterfly’s trauma:
terrified of settling down.
Maybe when we abandon home too many times,
We stop finding it inside ourselves.
-6-
What’s more of a disappointment?
To feel like you have never belonged to anyone?
To anywhere?
Or to feel like you have finally let your sails down,
Only to go flailing in the ocean again?
Only to go drinking through the blues again?
Only to swallow the blues again?
What’s more like home?
A place to run to, or
from?
-7-
Have we ever wondered how painful it is to lose a lash?
We pick one up,
Blow it away,
Suddenly and with no goodbye.
That is why we cry
Crafting ever-changing bodies of water,
Our own seas, sending the lashes on death boats
With no specific destiny,
Kicking the lashes out of their homes with no way to come back
And still hoping for their return to happen.
What happens to the lash once we pick it up from its home,
And blow it away?
How life-changing is it to be kicked out of home?
We run into lash-like humans every day.
We become lash-like humans every day.
To choose between leaving silently with a wave of water
Early in the morning,
Without a chance to say goodbye,
Or to be blown away mid-day
such that the goodbye becomes one less attire to wear for the walk of shame.
-8-
I want to move to a big city,
To that specific one across the ocean.
I like to close my eyes and imagine the people there as twigs,
Each one from a land
Each one from a plant
Leaving home as they knew it at birth
And coming together to form a Nest,
A new synonym for family
A new title for an entity.
I want to know how it feels like to hug your neighbor next door
With a cake or a bowl of soup
Without really needing to know them.
I want to form a society of strangers;
I want to be a stranger in a society of strangers/
To know too little, it forms a collective knowledge that is enough/
To say good morning to the guy selling newspapers down the street/
To say good evening to the girl buying flowers from him later that day/
-9-
We don’t know what we don’t know.
When you called me your hometown,
I knew, from the history of our lands, that you would migrate from your love to me –
sooner or later.
I did not know though, that no later is late enough.
Tonight, as you pack your bags,
I stand by the door and wave the ticket in the air,
Not to say goodbye,
But in an attempt to stick
the smell of home
to the portal that takes you away from it.
We don’t know what we don’t know.
I knew the candle I lit would melt to nothing by the time you reached your new home.
I did not know that I would keep on lighting candles in hopes that you find your way back to me.
Maybe when we abandon home too many times,
We stop finding it inside ourselves.
Maybe when we abandon home too many times,
It stops finding itself in us.