Heart is where my home is,
my soul,
my memories of becoming,
of being at my best,
sometimes my worst,
but always my most full, complete,
most abundantly happy, content.

Home unveils life’s liturgy.
This home where I was conceived
and born
has rebirthed me each dawn
through all my dream time,
where I grew up,
where siblings moved on,
where I was married,
from where I buried my grandparents,
and then my parents.

As my body houses my identity
my home houses my body.
While home and self-identity can be distinguished
one from the other,
this is never a benign discrimination;
a distinction without prospects for contented difference,
dishearted separation.

My soul and mind and body fade and wilt
withdrawn by force and circumstance
from my embryonic being.
To awaken or sleep away
in any other place,
without power or even hope to return,
fades my eyes and ears and nose,
my skin down to my spinal bones,
despair this senseless loss of sense
of life and breath and bread that once was mine
and could be mine to share again.

My home is where I live
my view of neighbors and town and Earth and life
flowing sedately toward, then past too quickly
on my backyard river
greeting ducks and swans
herons and eagles soaring by
to hunt this fertile rippling home with me
now fading into memory
as memory shades to apathy,
and apathy to this sad isolation
from my heart’s womb.

For Caroline