Home and Back

 by Brett Rutherford

Some were meant,
you guess, to stay behind,
and some were meant to flee.

At childhood’s end, the choice
is to stay and marry, dig deep
into the soil in recompense
for journeys not taken.

They seem to smile, sun-burnt
on their farm porch-fronts,
but their women dream of murder
as they roll the same dough
week in and out, years rounding
from christenings to funerals.

The children, rebuked, obey
their father’s orders, slapped
into compliance. Yet guns are ready,
for the hand that takes them first:
vengeance belongs to the one who breaks.

What does one say to them, “back home”?
What does your city mean to them
except a place they passed through
and shuddered at, uneas’d
at foreign tongues, brown faces?

How can one tell them
you belong to more than one city,
that you have stood on the world’s
underside, that strange hands
have touched you, and you liked it?
Walt Whitman’s poems are not known
to them. No Open Road lures them.
They only vote one way. No one
who is not like them matters.

You only come back
for the sake of the outlaw child.
You have placed dangerous books
in the town library.
You leave your poems, traces
in leaf and cloud, updraft
of raven and untamed hawk.
To one who does not belong here
you say: come home to Everywhere
and Nowhere. There you are free.

Your name has been erased here.
If you write, your letters drop
into some hole, unanswered.
Mars is your home, and Paris,
Rome and the battlements of Troy,
gazebo amid the pines in China —
New York and Providence,
Boston and the Golden Gate,
Pittsburgh of bridge and ravine,
your homes and havens —
oh, everywhere but here.