Wednesday, August 13, 2014

Poetics: Reno


A homecoming

Everything, everything I saw while driving
there was enveloped in beauty.
Besotted with three great forests, I
had haiku in my head, celebrations
transferred to scrappy notes at stops along
the way and later simply written on
paper with the steering wheel for support
as I drove. Everything, everything so
sublimely crystal real had full appeal
until, seemingly surreal,
The Biggest Little City came into view.

How now brown cow town,
with your bawdy teats suckling the masses
who build on your dry rolling hills, sucking
the life out of my memories of the place
where my mother breastfed me
in a room near the Truckee River, the
place where my haiku stream ran dry.....

But some love the town I left long
ago and left again, this time feeling
somehow renewed in spite of the disjunction
as, in spite of myself, a part of me
functions there still: a little blessing part that
whispers "please stop growing" - all the while
knowing it won't, and guessing it does not
mind that my mind was fresh with haiku
once I reached the next timber line
where everything was everything.

~~~

Written for dVerse Poets Pub - Poetics, where this week Abhra shares beautiful thoughts about frequent moving, and returning home, then asks us to compose a poem about a homecoming: "what it is to stay away and the coming back after a long time – have you been worried that the place you call home has changed all the time you have been away?"

~~~
This scene seems necessary to me. RIP, Robin Williams.


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9 comments:

Abhra said...

a little blessing part that
whispers "please stop growing" -

Smiles, indeed - I can relate to that thought very well. Thanks for joining my prompt.

Brian Miller said...

smiles. i like the middle stanza. it starts a bit funny with the how now brown cow but all kinda rolls together..i came from one of those towns i keep going back to...but i am glad i escaped....

brudberg said...

There seem to be only two alternatives for towns - grow or die.. Those small towns seem to becoming dust or metropolis - there's a voice in this I really like.

Folkways Note Book said...

Lydia -- You stirred up my hometown thoughts with your words. I have not been to the two towns that are adjacent and are my birthing place as well as my spent youth joy for many years. Yet I have no desire to return. Memories suffice for now -- there is always a time and place for everything. I so liked how you began with beauty and then headed into dry rolling hills seemly using them as metaphors for your feelings about the place. And your return to beauty, the timber line or metaphorically your life now. At least that is how I interpreted it. Nice! -- barbara

Helen said...

Hard to go back either way ~ progress, growth making it unrecognizable ... decay, death making it inhabitable.

susan said...

This is a haunting reminder of a dear old community changed beyond recognition in every respect but the landscape where it's situated.

I have one of those too, though not a town. Mine is a landscape of fields and woods largely empty of houses, that overlooks one of Ontario's smaller lakes. I know I don't want to see it now.

Rob-bear said...

They say you can't go home again. It's changed since you left. And you'v changed, too. No longer the same chemistry. Sigh!

Blessings and Bear hugs!

Brian Miller said...

hey you...how have you been?

Lydia said...

Sorta so-so, Brian, and thank you for caring! I need to reign myself in and get back to prompts at dVerse, that's for sure!

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