Click HERE to listen to my poem I Walked Back Inside My Childhood.
“We are all
refugees from our childhoods.” Mohsin Hamid.
I walked
back inside my childhood,
Where every
night, under my closed lids, the universe crumbled.
Where every
morning the world was built a new
In the
unfolding of kites and ribbons
I walked
back inside my childhood
My Gods were;
the red
breasted robin,
The trees I
climbed,
The thick
white clouds,
The swarm of
bees,
The pebbly beach,
The
seagull’s cry.
I walked
back inside my childhood,
I didn’t yet
have a body,
And my body
was all I had,
Elastic
limbs leaping, jumping, bouncing off every rock, every shore, every hill,
Flying, and
I often flew, I kissed a tangerine-colored sun, and in feather like ecstasy, fell
down a lilac
gingham sky.
I walked
back inside my childhood
Life was
constant motion, an ant colony I absorbed through my senses
Before language,
before meaning sloshed and boomed in my mind
I understood
things that were never taught me
Grownups were
safety, grownups were harm.
There was ice
and there was fire
There was
the loose fitfulness of love, there was the tight clutch of abandonment
I crept back
inside my childhood
Inside the whale’s
stomach
I searched for
my old discarded selves;
The formed, the
half-formed, and the transformed,
the roads
taken, the roads abandoned, the impossible roads
The crisscross
tire tracks to a long-gone home
I crawled back inside my childhood
In its fathomless
abyss
I smelled my
father’s violence, I tasted my father’s rage
I drank my
mother’s sadness, I drowned in her submissive, bitter tears,
Inside me,
trust is a broken mirror, it twisted, lacerated, and tore,
The man, the
oppressor. The oppressor, the man.
War was in the
shape of a man
Brutality took
the shape of a man,
Every man an
image of my father’s cruelty
Every fist,
my father’s first
His clenched
teeth, his hateful jeer, the poisonous snake uncoiling, the mantra to which I fell
asleep
I slithered
back inside my childhood
In the raven
plumage of night
I unearthed
graves I dug with bare fingers,
to bury people,
I promised I’ll never be
with dirt under
my nails, shivering, and delirious
I died
inside my childhood
The birds that
sang in vermillion, were now silent
The vibrant
daffodils gone gray
I could
start again, I thought
I could
start again, I lied.
My childhood
The endless
game of hide and seek, when I was SO afraid of being found,
When I was SO
desperate to be found
My childhood
The scent of
my grandmother’s house
The sinister
cat eyes glowing in the dark
My childhood
The quicksilver
of rain puddles
The shedding
of innocence and teeth
My childhood
The vanished
treasure I had under lock and key.
The softest
stuffed animal, the voodoo doll.
My childhood
The jungle
of joy, the long narrow coffin
The utter madness,
the fleeting wonder
My childhood
The golden
impoverished kingdom
The ruthless,
most gentle song.
