I Want This Place to Feel Like Home

it’s September and I burn to be part of the world growing out of a cockcrow. there is no earth between my fingers and the rain won’t stop falling. today, i stay indoors and watch LazyTown on tv. in old Norse, the word for home is lenda. I invent my childhood and lick from my yester-love—a knife body standing under the moon-glow in a landscape thick with birdsongs and the chatter of evening chores. what’s desire if not some kind of grace, my heart, a faithful dumb muscle beating only for puffins. if childhood is a body, let me be its hand. to hold firmly its freckle-dirt and bright yellow butterflies of deep joy. a hand crawling with some human-size worship of God. sometimes I feel like the green tang of a woman singing a song in which the world is unlistening, unlistening. I dream, moon-struck and a tongue licks the salt from my upper lip. this is how it finally begins. three boys ago, I language myself into a spring-fed lake–but most of all–at night, in my hand is a coffee cup whose emptying bears the ash of want. what is the word for home? what is the root of that word that kisses me insanely?

If This Isn’t Homecoming, What Is?

nothing makes my heart sing for home more than the journey towards it. today I listened to the radio and home becomes a language, a feeling – my mother always says the sea took you away, the sea will take you home. home is the smell of turf and the noise of crackling coal on the roaring fire. home is visiting my aunts. home is the creaking furniture in my father’s whare. home is the washing on the line and the anticipation of that first ominous drop of rain. home is waving at every truck I meet on the country roads. home is where everyone can pronounce my name. home is where my dog is. home is the positively charged centre of my life. home is where my heart is and where my soul resides.