Monday, June 18, 2007

When Dorothy Said, “There’s no place like home!” She Lied

I’ve been away trying to recapture a bit of something that I’ve left behind. I tried to go back to a place I once called a home of sorts. I found it to be full of people, but no one was there. That is no one that understood what this place had meant to me once. How it had kept me in a safe place when I had the most need of a haven. There had been some hard lessons learnt there, but in the end they put me on the right road.

I had been someone there once. A reader of sorts that did not pass judgment but relayed what little he knew on what little he understood of the written word. Some listened. Others ignored. But my presence was acknowledged. I was a recognized part of a whole.

Now my words fell – brittle leaves – to the floor. Trod on by callous feet that had heard about this sanctuary for the poet and wanted to see for themselves why it had achieved a certain reputation. They say, “Pshaw!” – Who are you & what have you done lately? There is no response I can give. I offer my poetry in sacrifice and it does not bleed for them. I offer them my counsel on poetics it will not slake their thirsts. I offer them my back and they take it willingly.


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Home is the place where, when you have to go there,
They have to take you in.

--------------------------------------------------------------------Robert Frost

3 comments:

Unknown said...

home- so many places were once- still are, but only for me- no one at all remembers some of them, when I'm gone- they will be too.

Anonymous said...

Home is where the inspiration strikes. Some periods of my life seem not just like closed chapters, but entirely different books altogether when compared to the other phases of my life.

Nick said...

Perhaps the Sociologist Robert Neelly Bellah said it best: "Leaving home in a sense involves a kind of second birth in which we give birth to ourselves."