COLLABORATIVE POETRY 8: COMING HOME

COMING HOME



Dear heart, at the wood’s edge, the blue-/ headed viroe repeats its only line. It isn’t true/ it has nothing to say— just as it isn’t true/ that sameness will not want to make us/ look again.---Luisa A. Igloria, "Letter to Sameness and Variation", Via Negativa, 04-16-11*



I am back, but I have nothing new to say,
nor anything that I can offer save myself.
Unchanged, undefined, unshackled, free.

There is no other way you would have me.
Would you rather I had lost my insouciance?
Would you have me speak only one language,

that of fear, and would not risk this loss again?
Sing only your song? Part my hair another way?
At the edge of the woods, I have mastered wiles.

You’d think I had changed and now just a shadow
of a broken man come home to lick old wounds
that were left unsalved, cankered when I lost you.

I am the same, and this sameness will make you
want to look again even if the thousand faces
that you behold are those from a shattered mirror.

—Albert B. Casuga
04-16-11

*Prompt:  This poem responds to "Letter to Sameness and Variation" by Luisa A. Igloria, and posted in the 04-16-11 Via Negativa post (http://www.vianegativa.us/).
It is part of a series of collaborative poems where this poet responds to Igloria's response to Dave Bonta's Morning Porch prompt http://www.morningporch.com/. Blending, these result in the creation of separately standing poems with re-drawn context and expanded nuances.