Poem I Wish I'd Written No. 1

Travel Advisory
by Rod Jellema

Remind yourself, when you wake to a strangeness
of foreign lights through blowing trees
out the window of yet another hotel, that home
is only where you pretend you're from.
What's familiar sends you packing,
watching for "some lost place called home."
You're from wherever you go.

Don't admit what you're looking for.
If you say to a baker in Bremen, to a barmaid in Provence,
"Back home we think of you here as having deeper lives,"
they'll shrug you wrong and won't repond.
And then you'll know: they're strangers too.
Broken and wrinkled stones and skin,
brush strokes and chords, old streets and saints you've read about,
flute-notes in laughter of foreign children,
the nip of a local market cheese --there's a life we almost knew once.
Watch. Just let it in.

The return ticket will take you only to town
where you packed to get on a the plane. It never missed you.
You'll notice alien goods in your kitchen,
wind in a wall, losses in the middle drawer of your desk.
Even there, the strange is the cup of communion you drink;
that dim outlandish civitas dei you're a citizen of never was a place.
Remember not to feel too much at home.