a visual poem of home where I was grown, not born shy but later was, didn’t learn what I should’a learned, then left, yet tethered, where mom yet lived, the way she did, where I came back again, then again, and cried sometimes quietly, privately, till that day, her last and held her hand, the way it should be, human care, and now what remains is dirt and grass and trees, a trace of water here and there, and unseen, that scent, oh that scent of warm Summer manzanita scrub with its deep red sloughing parchment skin, else brief Spring when green is the color coming home, again, another circle, till when I might return, a foreign bird. my bag of words. like this beauty is.
- think of all the many strangers
now tumbled kin, on a stroll down
the mountainside. some bear
green in remembrance of water
past, where footsteps are landed
now. near too rich a beauty for
one life, one breath to inhale.
still, I recognize this face.
wordswerepoemsfirst.com 
Thanks for sharing this idea and I love these images. Anita
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Thank you for saying Anita. It addressed a yearning in me, growing more these days from so far, and a different place. Place matters (reasons don’t) do you think?
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Ok
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So beautiful. This resonates and is my home too.
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Yes, I know, it resonates through much of California. Add in some redwoods like the Santa Cruz mountains for me, and that’s it. And of course Monterey Bay, but that was only (not only) my place to visit frequently. Thank you Cindy. I do remember what your home turf looks like. Also beautiful.
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Lovely, wistful, and nostalgic. We are forever connected to the land where we grew up. As a child I grew up in a very poor neighborhood. My house was on a court and I knew every inch of the cement, the shrubs, the trees. I knew the way the weeds grew in the backyard—the pattern they made along the leaning fence.
Then, later, we got a horse and boarded it in the country. That farm became my heart. I would explore on horseback and on foot. The rice fields are now all that’s left of all those places and sometimes I have to drive there and simply park and stare at them. It’s silly, but I have expect to see myself riding along bareback singing at the top of my lungs to the cranes. Now I think I must write a poem about that 🙂
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Lovely. Thank you for all of that. I remember the same, in my way of course. Everything was intimate, close, I knew all the bumps. Lived a block from the railroad tracks, big loud black steam engines in those days. And across the street a Sunsweet prune processing plan, busy all summer long. Most all that now gone. BUT NOT THE HILLS, like my post. (earth remains)
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Breathtaking. Both the poetry and the pictures. Even though it’s a visual poem, I love your attention to the unseen. I am so thankful for the way scent, taste, and sounds travel the full gamut of life with us. Even though we cannot always be “home”, home is always in our back pocket. For me it’s the smell of wet dew, the sound of train tracks (an old train ran behind my childhood home and the chugging would serenade me to sleep through a cracked bedroom window), the scent of musty dirt (a product of my dads dirty jeans after a long, hot summer day working as an electrician). These things we may never experience again, and yet we get to experience them for a lifetime. They re-appear in our senses.
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Thank you Heather. I love your descriptions, so unique, but that’s what makes their meaning real. Think I feel a prompt in all this. Read somewhere recently that perhaps the most, best we can do is express our personal experience of being alive. I know, one in a million, a billion, but still that’s the story uniquely us – a song worth hearing.
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