Home | Original Handwritten Poem | Reía Dawn Art

This listing is for the original poem below.  If it finds a little home in your heart, I'll write it for you by hand, and send it to your mailbox, postmarked with love.

Home
By: Reia Dawn of Ley & Sea

Today she asked me,
‘Where am I?’

Or at least, I thought I made out those words from

The vague murmur of sounds spilling off her lips.
They come throughout the day
In between moments of disorientation
And lucidity, in the driftings
In and out of the dreaming realms.

It made sense that she would wonder. 

‘Home,’ I told her, ‘you’re at home,’
Instantly regretting;
Rethinking my impulsive answer. 
I’d wanted to calm her nervous, furrowed brow
With a sure and easy answer, but
I didn’t know how this could be home for her.  

How many times have I reached
For a home beyond here,
Even in my health and my clear-headedness,
Be it some other place or
Some other body or
Some other time?

Later in the morning hours,
I set some soft piano to play, and
Opened the dusty blinds covering her window,
Watching the sunlight spill onto her pillow,
Across her coiled dark hair, and
Onto the rounded edge of her small shoulder. 

This was as much sunlight
That could ever reach her here,
In her last years.

It was so little that I felt it my duty to
Become the sunlight itself
Every time I came in to take care of her. 
So ironic for a woman who nurtured so many blooms under
So many Springs and so many Summers 
To be now so closed off from the wild out-of-doors.

She looked at me for a while,
In the way that she does,
With a worn glaze across her eyes of
Confusion and worry,
Mixed with a sometimes-surrender,
Interrupted at other intervals
By a muse of laughter or a childlike knowing
Or a presence in the room my visual perception could not interpret. 

My eyes met with hers and
The twinkles within danced together,
Twirling her back to a place,
Back to a body,
Back to a time when she could.
Back to her truer home, perhaps.

Her feet still tapping to the rhythm,
A flash of her guardian Crow
Flew his shadow across the window
With the open blinds 
As he flew home to his nest in the
Branches above her house.

The flap of wing,
The winking shadow, and the
Quick glint of light as the sun
Folded its light around the crow’s body,
Mirrored in my eye as she
Kept her gaze locked on me.

My eyes have seldom felt a more pure purpose.

To be a clear window where
A shadow can flicker past and
Where light can stream in
Where there can be a remembering,
Even if faint,
Of the fated flight home.