Homeland

HOMELAND

How strange to happen across oneself,
on a bus chockfull of business associates,
in the night so far
from my own created safety

Traveling through the desert to our destination,
I was confronted by spectres from a distant past,
at once tangible and ethereal as the dust devils,
small tornadoes
that rise from the desert floor

Long-forgotten voices whispered and wailed,
beseeching the dignity of memory,
of recognition

There were echoes of my voice,
and the voices of my brother and sisters
and of my mother, and the monster she married,
the man to whom she chained us all,
the man only I have escaped

I felt in wisps of memory
the fear and repulsion and the blows,
raining and wailing and swirling around us
as we drove on through the dark

No experience is forgotten

I am reminded of the need to confirm these demons of days gone by,
to allow them to be and then put them behind me
as these twenty-some-odd long gone years demand

I have left the madness and the fear behind;
the monster no longer rises
to torment
my troubled sleep

But still, the ghosts do return now and again,
to be seen and heard and then driven back
in their haunting, hunted pride

It is a place I left to create myself anew

The ghosts do yet serve in an hour of need;
they serve to remind me
that the wellspring of compassion and strength
which feeds my soul
is the legacy of pain

And the language of forgiveness,
which dares to speak,

speaks only truth