Home Is a Verb Now
The poet redefines home not as a lost place but as an act he makes, daily, in words
Many years have passed since the night I carried my language across the darkened border.
The country I fled no longer exists as I knew it; even its street names have been changed.
For a long time I waited, as exiles do, for the that would call me back.
The never came, and slowly I understood that there was no longer any "back" to go.
The place I longed for had become a date, not a destination, fixed forever in a vanished year.
And so I stopped treating home as a noun, a dot on a map I might one day reach.
I had spent decades searching for home as a place, and finding only its polished, painful absence.
Then, in the third voice, I discovered that home had quietly changed from a noun into a verb.
Home was no longer where I was from; it was something I did, daily, with my hands and mouth.
I was homing, the way a bird homes, not toward a fixed point but along a living .
To make a sentence that was truly mine was, I found, to build one wall of that house.
Each poem laid a floor; each honest word set, however briefly, a roof against the weather.
Belonging, I learned, is not granted by soil or passport but practised, , like a difficult art.
It is provisional, unfinished, and must be remade each morning, or it quietly falls to .
The exile's error is to believe that home was left behind, whole, in a single lost place.
The truth is stranger and kinder: home is , and we carry the makings of it within us.
I carry mine now in two languages and the third that grows, grafted, between them.
My mother tongue did not die on that journey; it learned, in the end, to live differently.
It lives now braided with another, and the braid is stronger than either alone.
I no longer mourn the pure poet I was, for purity, I see, was only another word for loss.
What I have instead is a wider country, one I am building still, line by patient line.
It has no borders to defend, no accent to betray, no papers a guard could ever demand.
Its only citizens are the words I choose, and its only law is that I keep speaking.
On the night I left, I did not know whether my language would survive the crossing.
It did survive, though not unchanged; and neither, thank goodness, did I remain the man who carried it.
We arrived together, , into a life that neither of us could have imagined at the border.
I am still writing, still homing, still making the country that no one can take from me.
And each morning, in whatever tongue the day requires, I begin, once more, to build my home.