The world shutters up. I follow suit.
Only to realise there’s no one place
where I fully belong. Home, walled in,
loses concavity; flattens out like a lounge,
a place of transit wanting one to bide
patiently, to not stay, grow, belong.
I walk our rooms like lines of a poem
I have known by heart. Only now, there’s
more here. Fear lines the walls like dense
memories of fingerprints. Silence has
more questions to ask. Laughter finds ways
to avoid mirrors. Suspicion stretches wearily
under the dining table, a homeless cat. I
feel its thick fur under my feet. Condiments,
grains I have never befriended before, stare
me in the face. They promise my famished
nightmares boiling pots, well-fed hearths ablaze.
Do I have enough for our need, I ask myself,
but having never learnt need’s arithmetic, I let
go. I decide, in walling in, I must play host to
them all. I scrub floors, water plants, offer damp
clothes, hair, pillows to the sun. I allow myself,
for a moment, to be taken in by the unchanged
smell of coconut oil on my palms. Their little
noses pressed to the glass, the children’s
longings remind me of the world’s edges,
of tender fish hungers at an aquarium’s
corners, of caged birds, of freedom on a
leash. I dig out with both hands the gravel
in the heart, beckon to the brood, sing a song.
- from Stitching a Home (2021)