Poem "All the homes I ever breathed"

Here love & ghosts will always greet me, / forever live within me as I leave.

Photograph by Nadia Gerassimenko

Dear hopeful reader,

Lately I’ve been thinking about breathing—how it’s becoming a luxury for some; for others, it was never an amenity.

As these days I’m struggling to breathe, lungs filling with stagnant heat and wildfire smoke from way miles afar and other kinds of air pollutants, my heart struggling to beat in a calm rhythm, I think about how we don’t think about breathing until we’re forced to.

While I’m trying to breathe and thinking about breathing, I think about living. I think about how we live. And I wonder, do we ever truly live? Living is one thing, days blurring into each other going by us day by day by day. But truly breathing in a place, a moment, a being—that’s different.

I think about the concept of home. I lived in interesting homes to say the least, wonderful homes, unsafe homes, unhappy homes, homes where inside or outside was harming me as I’m being harmed now. So home is a complicated topic for me.

But with each new home I get closer to feeling safe and secure. I realize there is no perfect home, but safety and security are the bare minimum anyone deserves. A home that feels like a soothing, supporting cradle, where you feel yourself a baby again in your beloved fetal position.

As I’m coughing and thinking about breathing, I get inspired to write about living in homes, or rather breathing them in.

So I write a poem about memories that felt momentous, bent by passage of time, fiction, and magical realism. A poem holding vignettes, some harmonious, others cacophonous, but all still with a distinctive musicality of their own. Imperfect, but as they should be.

And my heart and lungs also fill with gratitude for being able to remember these memories, for them to still move me, for the inspiration even at a trying time. I don’t believe I would have written about breathing in homes if I wasn’t so preoccupied by breathing myself.

Now I can’t stop thinking about breathing. And breathing in a place, a moment, a being. Even if it’s just petting a purring kitty between catnaps. That’s breathing and living too.

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All the homes I ever breathed

I.
Like a carp out of water
I gulped to fly as an eagle.
Walled by mountains full of apples
the sky was so low I could swing
for a star & burst from a wish.

II.
First time I felt cold lake wind
& heard laughter of seagulls.
My tongue froze, all sounds I ever
learned swallowed to silence.
I did not need to know to speak
to see how lonely one could feel
from a different far-flung sea.
Today I do know other words
for gulls—mews, mouettes & more.

III.
Brothers & sisters from all walks
of life gathered together liquid gold
from sweet heavenly flowing maples.
Spring is springing, we celebrated
with pancakes, sausages & eggs
drowned in the nature’s syrup.
Spring has sprung, I watched us dancing,
fiddle & feet ringing in my ears.
There was snow outside still; here,
our hearts were melted sugar.

IV.
Here we danced beneath midsummer
moonlight, snails & dew our quiet watchers.
Here we sang romances before our time—
therefore for all times, wheat & willows
entwining us in their waltzing sways.
Here we repaired each other’s hearts,
broke them apart—kintsugi in reverse.
Here I cagily imagined you as blackbird
playing hide-&-seek on a verdant perch,
your wings of flashing red an easy giveaway.
On this island within an island I prayed
to unremember, current-carried memories
swallowed & spat as fragments I one day forgave.
Here love & ghosts will always greet me,
forever live within me as I leave.

V.
Once I lived in a home that was
a vessel flooding, a jungle within
a jungle breaching—where outside
was inside & inside was all out, too.
Then I fled to grounds more flooded,
where a sinking pew sat waiting.
I felt myself escaping, how lovely
it would be to float & just be.  

VI.
I do love misty daybreaks on the shortest month,
the blue of burning summer sky, the swelling moon
hung low at night, a squashy scent as earth falls sleeping.
I do love counting cottontails shading in blades of grass
before away they zigzag, or how much longer airborne
turkey vultures glide until they alight atop a roof.
I do love a gaggle like the sound of day bazaar
breaking from afar unto our window, or a nightly
ranine chorus laughing us to gentle sleep.
I do love staring matches with a fiery fox;
I awe at her screams unseen, becoming
a monstress myth in the hush of night.  
I do love much about here—
bleeding-hearts announcing spring,
when corvids drape barren trees.
But, I do not love the stolen hours
we pay with memories unlived.

VII.
Home is where you leave your heart
a little bit each time & place.
First I left a heart of me gaping at the falls,
like I could myself fall & float as
tiny drops of water body whole.
I left my heart with five more
in laughter on main street.
I left it in summer heat, rain & red
foliage too, snow-clad sidewalks crispy
as I wandered—seasons nuanced
in the depths of all that made me.
I’ll leave myself with bricks reborn from fire,
on curves of small-town smiles & hearty hi’s,
in breathful woods & valleys of near
countries—all mysteries & truths out there.
Oh, how I want to believe I could
live my heart in here forever.

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Have you ever written about the concept of home? Do you have a favorite prose piece or poem about the subject? What is your favorite memory of your home?

Yours hopefully,

Nadia

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