A Bayou Homecoming
Empty airport near cargo.
At 5 AM, the fluorescent light flickers
And casts grim shadows.
Bulky coats and woolen hats
Flip flops in a suitcase.
.
They are leaving this place,
Keening for change.
He watches the ballet of planes
Taking off and landing
In the near darkness.
Window seat for him, always.
He reads the safety card
cover to cover, and over again
While she sleeps, slack-jawed,
On a headrest.
Economy and Business class,
The story of a second marriage.
A Layover.
Humidity wakes them sluggishly
And the time has changed,
rendering them even older.
Everything here is either stagnant or fried
And smells of sticky sweat.
Finally, the longest bridge,
A spillway
And as far as the eye can see
Are their twisted, humble roots.
They reach this forsaken place
Under the veil of twilight.
Just a bend in the road
where memory begins.
Houses on stilts and weeping trees,
Folks whose walks quicken with recognition.
They hug hard and long
And what they say is,
come and give me some sugar.
Soft drizzle begins and caresses the senses,
beckoning them toward
something wordless and knowing,
a shared swamp dream. .
At first, they recoil.
Their rational minds oppose
The savage history of this place.
Its corrupt and backwater ways.
Exclusion, violation
And everywhere you look,
the lack.
But their child hearts love it.
Their child selves love the
Familiar faces of their kin
wizened now, yet more yearning,
Eyes that are still soft and kind.
The music here turns bodies into liquid
And they yield to this freedom,
shedding urban angst like a scab.
Sunsets streak across the bayou
Where they first learned to fish.
The perfume of magnolia mixes
with the stench of the old bait shop.
They have crawled back
into this fertile embrace
and it is home,
the hush of the womb.
Here the drawling voices are a balm
That soothe city wounds.
The rhythm of crickets on the water
The frogs that sing them to sleep.
She opens like a hothouse flower.
And he must get fifty pounds lighter,
Mostly in his eyes.
They see what they could have been
And what they could have had.
A far-flung family
Frayed threads they tried to weave together
With a long-distance loom.
And finally, the sons arrive.
The kids he came so far to see
Looking like a woman
he used to love.
Grown men now.
A hollow reminder
That time has touched them, too.
They feel full circle and yet
strangely Incomplete,
Melancholy with a strain of awkward.
Spun out over the years.
Love they never saw coming,
And children
they never saw going.
WILDsound Writing Festival 