Homeward again under foreign stars, <br />history was a strange gush of wind from memory <br />that came to echo waterfalls of those years: <br />home to find the place lost among <br />galaxies of signs. The hills were gone. The river <br />trail was forgotten... Trying to remember meadowlark <br />and those who perished in the vanishing land <br />(bones in the earth where our parents died poor) , <br />the journey fell into heavy tides of flowing <br />scorn that echoed and reechoed time there. <br /> <br />The sun was most unkind to the place: <br />history: names of men: patterns of life: <br />all that distant floodtide heaved and moved, <br />breaking familiar names that immortal tongues <br />clipped for the heart to cry, 'Home is a foreign address, <br />every step toward it is a step toward three hundred years <br />of exile from the truth...' <br /> It was not homeward <br />to the first known land, nor escape <br />to white sea sprays blossoming on inland shore, <br />nor love leaping the boundaries naked in the soul, <br />but a vast heritage of war and destruction breaking <br />too soon for the living and willing to die. <br /> <br />Life is a foreign language. Every man mispronounced it...<br /><br />RIC S. BASTASA<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/landscape-with-figures-by-carlos-bulosan/
