This Is What It Feels Like

a stranger in familiar land      my blood too sings from the cracks of cobbled streets i can count paces between the old and new   i felt it within delicate configurations : carvings and photographs, ceramic figurines dipped in resin my Mama’d collected,       passing down like water in a slow stream      tipped in gravity like me   i heard a song and let it carry me felt a pull outside the scenes of my fatherland      a daughter meant to leave said my impassive stars, if actions were to mean anything but what does meaning look like? everything looks the same here but older i hang the washing, walk to the shop for eggs and cheese and when i go back i fall right in- to all the same places (only I’m driving) but ‘nothing’s too far away these days’ i tell my sister and my friends, sipping beer as good as Texas on a Tuesday in the west end dripping with irony and maybe even satisfaction