What to remember when packing up boxes
You grow roots plunging into soil
made of neighborhood streets
and warm voices filling rooms
and city lights
painting night skies.
Here these roots
carve comfortable spaces
stretching wide the soft earth
for settling
and building homes.
But there is always the leaving
of things
and it comes one day
as a wave rushing in
dissolving those houses
and ligts and voices
into an ocean of discarded pasts.
You find yourself
washed up on the shore
of some foreign present
once the distant future
dazed disoriented
limbs limp soggy roots
tangled and trailing
bits of remaining soil.
Here no one speaks
the language of your past
or recognizes familiar parts
folded in the lines
and curves of your face.
No longer with a definition
or a place
on a map.
And yet.
Departure from the familiar
is not a mourning
of one's self.
For we may leave and arrive
over and over again
stitching together homelands
from ever changing skies
and streets and faces
but what we need
we carry within our bones
across boundaries
across times.
(written in April 2019)