Love Poem: Gypsy Homebound
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Written by: Gerald Dillenbeck

Gypsy Homebound

Heart is where my home finds graceful relationship,
where my soul simply breathes
beneath my memories of becoming,
of being at my best,
sometimes my worst,
but always my most full, complete,
most abundantly contentious 
and both loudly out 
and quietly in 
content.

Home unveils life's liturgy.
This home wherein I was conceived
and born
rebirths me each dawn
and decomposes all my dreams
where I grow up and out,
where siblings moved away
from whom I married,
from where I buried my grandparents,
and then my parents.

As my body houses identity
my home houses body.
While home and self-identity 
I can distinguish,
one self from other,
this is never a benign 
or wisely severe discrimination;
better as a distinction 
without prospects today for contented difference; 
dishearted separation.

My soul and mind and body fade and wilt
withdrawn by force and circumstance
from embryonic being.

To awaken or sleep away
in any profanely alien place,
without power or even hope to return
to more sacred memoried space,
fades my eyes and ears and nose,
my skin down to my spinal bones,
despair this senseless loss of sense
of life and breath and bread that once was mine
and could be mine to share again.

My home is where I live
my view of neighbors and town and Earth and life
flowing sedately toward, then past too quickly 
on my backyard river of memory,
greeting ducks and swans
herons and eagles soaring by
to hunt this fertile rippling home with me
now fading into memory
as shades of sympathy 
not entropy,
sad self-isolating apathy
from my heart's dismembering womb.

Lavish price for a new bodied home
invites sublimating new constructions
with best familiar practices and intents,
artifacts of golden memories from past days
and life
and loves
reframed by unfamiliar
but grace welcoming
trees 
and birds 
and a few persistent weeds.