Old expatriate’s
Homebound heart
Questions galore
Will I find the home
Long ago
I left behind
So much has changed there
Mornings do not start any more
With greetings from familiar voices
Do not hear the chirping of birds
Nor hear infants cry
Hear only strange voices all around
People passing by the front yard
Eyes search for familiar faces
Neighbors who were like my own
Uncle, aunts, brothers and sisters
All those I had known
In the grasp of cruel time all are gone
All that remained are memories, and
In my heart
An unexplainable anguished groan
Inside the four walls of the house
Searching for familiar faces
Hoping against hope, maybe I will hear
Loving voices of those I lost
Mournful whistles of long distant trains
No longer disturbs my midnight sleep
Hooting of owls does not pierce anymore
Abject stillness of the night
Inside the closed concrete house
There is a strange silence at night
In a familiar place
Tired mind searches for what is lost
Only an unfamiliar surrounding permeates
It’s difficult to make an
Inconsolable mind understand
You can not go back home again
Fleeting Muse 
Breathtaking!
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Thanks my friend. I think all of us who made our home away from home will go through similar feelings sometime or other in our life.
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Exactly. You are welcome, my friend.
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Having been in Brazil as a volunteer these past 13 years, I also wonder what it would be like to go back to live in the US. I am not from here and now I am not from there. Strange to be from nowhere so I will be from everywhere. hugs, pat
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I understand that feeling and tried to capture that in another of my poem titled “Journey”, posted a few weeks back on my blog.
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This is a wonderful poem…very visual and poignant with many of the feelings that we touched upon in discussing my poem about the morning glory flowers. Thanks so much for sharing, I enjoyed it immensely.
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Thanks for visiting and liking this poem. This is the first poem I wrote in my mother tongue after long long years and it was published in the yearly magazine of our community in 2014. I later translated it to English for posting to my blog.
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That’s so wonderful, congratulations. I enjoyed it 🙂
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You said it all when you described the old ‘home’ as a concrete box. Take away the time, the people, the life that was lived there and it’s just a building like any other.
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Thank you.
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🙂
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