THE FAMILY

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
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
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, a place no longer real
Somewhere they can never
Go again

And so I won’t speak a word
Spread my fingers across my lips
With the decency of silence
For soon,
Though I have swollen the river of time
With fifty years,
I will pack up my packages
And I will
Go home

Home
That 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 deepest storm
A light shines at the top of the hill
And love waits ever patient within
This is a place called forever
And it sings to my heart and
Dances endlessly deep beneath my blood
Come home . . .
It whispers

Come
Home

© Edwina Peterson Cross