When do you most love coming home?

Going Home
       
Everyone agrees
With a sort of  empty sandpaper sadness
That an adult
Just cannot go home again
Everything there has changed
And so have you
Everything looks the same
Seems the same,
But like a jigsaw puzzle swollen with the damp
Nothing fits now, and home just isn’t home
Anymore

Every head nods in understanding
Everyone feels the same
It seems to be universal
All understand
It is a melancholy, but well accepted fact
Each feels a brief, hollow soreness
Just below the breastbone
An ache for a world that is gone, no longer real
A place that they can never
Go again

I won’t speak a word
And I’ll lower my eyes
To cover the deep gold shine
For soon,
Though I have swollen the river of time
With more than fifty years,
I will pack up my packages
And I will
Go home

Home
Where it has never been static, and so has always changed
Home
That is ever the same
Home
Where I fit the minute I walk in the door
As though I had never walked out
Fluid and flowing in a ceaselessly changing pattern
That remains forever constant
There is no chasm here, there is not even a chink
My path to this doorway is seamless and solid

In the blackest night
In the roughest storm
A light is always burning
In this haven on the hill
Retreat, refuge
From a world that can be violent
Ugly and so unkind
Here there is still
Shelter, sanctuary
In the light of a deep, patient, unconditional
Love

And if
Someday
The house is gone, the walls folded away
The windows nothing but wind
Keening sharp and piquant around the little hill
I will still hear the calling . . .
Come home . . .
Come home . . .
And I will go

Finding everything changed
And everything exactly the same
The light will still be shining
Deep and patient
From the heart that has loved me
Utterly unconditionally
All of my life
This is a light called ‘Family’
This is a place called ‘Forever’

I will always be able to
Go home

Then I will stand on the little hill myself
Reminiscing, remembering, recollecting
My heart lit with a deep gold love
Utterly unconditional . . .
I will smile
Stretch my arms to the sky in gratitude and bliss
And I will call the children
Home


©Edwĭna Peterson Cross

My Mother's House