Digging For Dandelions
Recalled sounds take you back to an old land
to a home you no longer need.
Like the soft snuffle of hedgehogs on the lawn
on a summer evening.
Here there are larger less harmless spiny beasts,
here there are robins that are not robins.
Differences, semantics, and misidentification
small stuff, but with larger significance embedded.
Many places here derive from Native American names
or English cities and towns, a few Irish places,
French or German other European words.
It should feel like home to be in Boston
or as in Ohio,
to be just down the road from Dublin or London,
more often it seems to be even a greater distance
between the original
and those other named-for locations.
I guess the Dutch don’t want anything to do with New York now.
The geography of river-systems forgets the paddle
and the canoe
as modern party pontoons multiply.
It’s just natural for history to forget sources and tributaries.
The North Atlantic is relatively small compared to the Indian ocean
yet in our measuring minds, language, nuance, and common usage
create a much greater divide.
As for this deep rooted dandelion I have become,
I keep digging deeper into a foreign soil
finding where all these nomenclatural seeds arrived from,
and why they still keep a lighter than air memory
of faraway windblown lands.
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