Dear Motherland

Janet Lilethia Harvey

If I should tell you of my sadness

you’ll weep fo’ me. I know you will.

If I paint a picture of the Christmases

I spent in my self-inflicted exile.

So bewildered that I’ve savor my grief as side dish

I have never tasted a meal.

When the phone call from home frightens me

-at 3am, I fist the air and shatter the sky

enraged at my fractured existence.

I come face to face with my own powerlessness.

The shattered sky rained so hard, the rivers took the last strand

of hope.

It flew over the edge of the waterfalls and was gone.

Will be a very long time before it appear

as dust in the atmosphere,

long after, I will it into existence.

I was not equipped to jar and hide this murderous

disappointment and failures, the slip and falls,

on the slick of icy moments, we immigrants tread.

The itemized brokenness

or the lethal resurface of the love’s abandon.

Life serves me with no script,

dear homeland if my confession scars your ears

or your heart terrorized by my unzipped wound

wait for no apologies- it will not come.

Candle in the storm