There's No Place Like Home

I'm currently teaching poetry once a week to fifth graders who were affected by the immigration ICE Raids in our town. Tomorrow's topic is home. What is it? Where do we find it? How can we define it wherever we are? Many of these children and/or their families face deportation in the next few months. They are, for sure afraid and the message I want to leave with them is by Rumi: “Fear is the cheapest room in the house – I’d like to see you in better living conditions.”

I started thinking about metaphors for home, my own writing about home. Here are two examples:

Single Person Dwelling

I am many roomed
and every year there are fewer corners,
less closets, softer lighting, and ceilings that vault and vault.
Songs whisper through my walls:
cotton lullabies that rock me to sleep,
velvet green ballads, safe in their loneliness, and sometimes
the floors quake with a Barbra Streisand sing-along.

Laughter surrounds my walls
like tree frogs in the garden. Someday, soon, I will open
the back door and those leggy frogs will spring into the kitchen,
fill the sink and we will all croak and chuckle contagiously.
But for now I am content in knowing they are just outside the window.

A formal entrance, the front door, opens to an orderly white.
Exacting angle of an ottoman and precise tilt
of the picture frames may cause you to pause and ask,
“Unapproachable? Cool? Elegant, but stiff?”
Do not hesitate.
Do not pause. Please, come in.
Turn my rooms upside down.
Leave your garden footprints on the China Silk carpet.

Yes, the toothpaste is neatly rolled from the bottom up.
Yes, spices and books are alphabetized, magazines fanned
on the coffee table, and socks color-coded in their drawer.
But, poems fly across rooms in random chaotic scribbles.
Furniture is shoved aside when the need to dance arrives.
Passions stack up for the weekend
when a mere word like “mellifluous” can extend the day
into a ‘never get out of my bathrobe’ flurry,
a tigerlily tangle, an elegant mess.

Orchids bloom in steamy bathrooms, but die on precious shelves.
Can you smell the wet carnations, vanilla, violets, and bread?
Do you notice the ladybug on the light switch -- in my many rooms?

In my many rooms there is moonlight that slides in
through partially opened blinds; moonlight like memory
that lays in blue-white streams over elbows, wrists, and fingertips—
moonlight like memory that cannot be held.