STC Challenge for Anschul

[unpredictablebijou]

How bout we poets make a little mojo to send the most excellent vibes for both the physical and emotional transition our beloved Chef is experiencing at the moment.

It's hard to leave Home. It's hard to process a shift like that. So the title for this challenge is:

Home, Here.

Get on it, you lovers of fine food and quality companionship.

hearts

bj

 

[sassynyc]

Home, Here

pack up memories embedded
in taste, smell, sight and sound
the length of legacy lives in these walls
entrusted in hearts that live and love hard
take up the beach, grain by grain on your back
and carry it to new walls in the country
for love is transportable you see
with no postal code to hinder transference
new legacy awaits your arrival with baited breath
and in those walls, you will watch your girls grow
to be amazing women, guided by example
of amazing parents who plant seeds with green thumbs
this is your soil to till, laying down roots, find home here.



(and when you are settled in, know home is HERE as well)

 

[UnderYourSpell]

Though you travel far across this land
and follow roads all new
home is where the heart is
Godspeed my friend to you

 

[champagne1982]

Home, Here

The quality of light
is nothing short of amazing
as we carry this bit
of memory in our hands.

The sky holds a constant blue.
With peacock ego, it sparkles
as it admires itself on the calm
glass of our lagoon. The one
that looks back at me as I stare
into the depths of your eyes
and answer the siren's call
you sing with sad need.

Take me home. Here with you
is my hearth, always where
your heart beats warm.
Right here, home -
is beside you.

 

[Homburg]

Wherever she is

I spend too much
of my life staring
through windshields and
waiting quietly patiently
for the end of that grey ribbon
and the heart that
lies there waiting likewise.

They say that home
is where the heart is
but I see home
as where the love is.

I am home
when I lie beside
that beating pulsing soul
aching for every second
that we can be as one.

We are defined
by those who love us
and our travels
and destinations
mean nothing more
than the love they hold
once we stop moving.

 

[Sara Crewe]

An old one from me..

I started to write about a house that was special to me in this poem and realized it was actually the person--and she is always with me. She's the person who taught me who to bake.

My thoughts...

The Rising

In old houses without closets
skeletons dance in the open
to the steady drip of time

that slips from gabled peaks
like tired rain, ready to sink
into the ground but catches me

in its path and I am soaked
in reflection while memories
trickle down window

panes like movies playing
on an empty screen. A nail
in the frame holds her rosary

beads worn from fingers
I feel on my skin. The scent
of drugstore perfume whispers

from paisley dresses covered
with her apron. Idle strings trail
undone in the quiet kitchen

where the woodstove is cold,
nothing baking in its belly
but I can smell the bread that woke

me summer mornings. See her
casual shift to make a spot for me
to knead my dough, no instructions

beyond a smile. She made fifty.
I made one that feeds me even now.

 

[unpredictablebijou]

home, here.
for anschul


Perhaps it is not everything
but it is a place to begin:
This shape, two crescents
and a doorway
for your thick
Janus self
who lives and moves
at that border.

You, I know
have found that home
at the still temple center of your
urban heart, crowded
with joy and uproar.
The bright sweet
flesh of the goddess-door
leads to everything
everything important.

Perhaps it is not everything
but it is a place
where you, where I
where we all
begin.

 

[unpredictablebijou]

Anschul is, gradually, returning, and glad we are to see him.

But the journey toward "home" is never simple or quick, and in this case that journey is really only beginning. So I'm reviving this thread once more, just in case there are more little spellings we can do to make the finding of Home in a new, strange place more interesting, more kind, more effective, more thoughtful.

Here's my own contribution at the moment.

I had never lived in the "country" before, or even much ventured outside an urban environment, until the house burned down.

Yeah. A big fire, in the beautiful 1907 three-story monstrosity we were in the middle of renovating. Original leaded glass in the windows. A parson's bench in the foyer. Incredible house.

That's another story. It's enough to say that there was a lot of screaming and then we were suddenly looking for houses to buy in the rural hills of Kansas.

Everyone else in the household was stoked. They saw small businesses with greenhouses, ways to Live Off the Land, privacy, a covenstead, a house with a solid foundation and a good roof, land that could be bought cheap, cleaned up and benefit from the sweat equity. I saw shanties and abandoned cars in Deliverance.

But I ended up seeing something else at the same time. I remember the incredible foreign quality of the land. I saw how, when you first visit a place, you notice everything - the colors and shapes of things, how the trees look, doorknobs, the color of white paper. Things reveal themselves for the first time, things that you will see over and over for perhaps even the rest of your life.

Now, in my thirteenth year on the Hill, I drive these same roads with intense love and familiarity. And something has happened that never happened any place else: I can still quite tangibly and voluntarily go back to that Vision, the way I looked at these places when I first saw them, how alien and intense the landscape was, how bright everything seemed. I can look at them like that as I drive by, and get that freaky feeling I had during that first six months, that first year.

It may or may not be a useful skill, as such. I'm not sure what it's good for, past an occasional amusement. The amusement is important, though, because it goes like this:

I wish I'd known then what I see now. I wouldn't have been so freaked out. It was all going to be just fine, just fine after all. Quite beautiful, in fact. And perfectly correct.

Sometimes, from that amusement, I imagine that I can actually go back and whisper in her ear, that poor crazy chick riding in the back seat of the real estate agent's Crown Victoria, getting out of the air conditioning into hundred-degree July heat to thrash around in another field of dried grass, another strange house inhabited by strangers. I smile at her, poor thing, as she learns drywalling and plumbing and how to pull 30-year-old metal fence, and I imagine whispering in her ear. It's going to be fine. Relax, and remember this part. It's going to be just fine after a while.

welcome home, doll.

bj

 

[Anschul]

There's a little patch out back,
With beans and chard and tomatoes,
Growing tall and strong
Against the blazing summer sun,
With no water and no attention,
With no love and no tending,
But growing toward the sky.
Against the life-sucking weeds
These edibles fight to survive,
To nourish bodies young and old,
But more to show their backbone,
A will to live against all odds.
A sign of character
Not lost on new inhabitants
Determined to match the will to survive,
To thrive in this new place
As if it ever was,
Home.