Home

Home,

a word we built,

clay in our child hands

destined for glossy oven birth.

Home became

a word that flutters,

a wanderer without anchors,

defiant sails braced for storm thrusts,

stained, and needing to be polished again,

reborn.

But back to home

at the beginning.

*

If my child walls

had a color, they would be

Pueblo red, mud soft, brick strong.

If memory has a color, that’s it.

I once believed in jackal-fears and viper

lighting storms, skeleton grins

and spider nightmares.

But the monsters never came.

Not near my mother’s smell,

her squeaky kiss, the clean sheets.

Not near Dad’s heavy feet upstairs,

his whistle-hum over the coffee

machine, sister’s sparkling eyes

as she flushes my jelly sandals

in the toilet.

These moments

still hum like an old cat on my lap,

worthy of affection.

*

Then I saw how Home

must grow into mosaic,

how Time cracks and breaks it,

how we must mold the

old pieces into soft, fresh clay.

A constant art.

Family vacations through mountain

passes, rain spinning against my window,

listening to our murmurs

whip away in time,

holding our words in my

mind on replay.

Maybe that is why I write.

To hold the pieces long after they’ve

crumbled. To remember

their magic.

*

But sometimes for too long

I consider the cracks:

A song on the radio

reminding me of an old friend.

How I hold you, love,

like water.

Rome, already deteriorating

two times faster

in my mind

since last summer.

Arguments like bee stings,

swollen days after.

Praying for reconciliation.

As a child, burying a mole.

Its soft, dark eyes closed

because it dug too many mansions.

Aching to be in our apartment

in Rome, just for a moment

to feel again the pressing heat,

to see white shirts fluttering

on a neighbor’s clothesline.

*

But when I consider

all this too deeply,

I forget to work in new clay.

While I try to rest in the words

and the anchors of the people I love

my mind still fights to fly

past stars, through deep waters.

I could build so many Babels

if my flesh and bones

didn’t hold me so tightly.

But even Superman must have felt

empty. Alone,

that is the price of flight.

See me with all my cracks,

I’m too old now for child walls.

But always young enough

to warm my hands at the

hearth of the ones I love,

between my snow journeys

for new walls.

That is when I taste it.

*

When I taste this one Home

I have still to enter.

Most days, it seems more

mirage than solid,

an eternal desert crawl away.

But it waits,

confident,

oven-baked to glossy perfection,

Pueblo red, mud soft, brick strong.

The final rebirth.

I taste it sometimes:

Steady, like my feet

anchoring under

sun-filled maple trees.

The sweet ache of

acceptance,

a kiss on a mud-stained

cheek, a tight hug from the

friend who once slipped away

like water.

In these moments

at the well

of human dignity,

the mirage stiffens

into reality.

I ache for this

honey wine completion.

No more cracks, no more new clay,

Just enough.