Homeland

Oriana Ivy

Twenty years later I’m told I am foreign.
How naïve to have thought
I’d grow out of it. As if I could erase
that Columbus Day:
 
in the morning
I had a homeland;
in the evening
I had two suitcases.
 
Twenty years later under desert sky,
I remember the stencil
of drizzle in Warsaw.
On the sill of our old kitchen,
 
pigeons ruffle like small gray clouds.
My uncle and my father
raise a toast with żubróvka,
the buffalo vodka, the bottle lit
 
with a blade of buffalo grass.
I ought to remember
in more vivid color,
but I was carelessly young.
 
I tried so hard: changed my name,
ate only with my right hand --
eager to throw away extra vowels
and hands. Twenty years later
 
men still want me to touch them
in French, slide toward them
on slow Slavic looks:
“You’re from the Old World --
 
You know how to treat a man.”
I must be centuries old --
I am river and rain.
And the half-remembered
 
Warsaw parks, chapels of green dusk;
through a fence of shadows
I call after the long-lost child.
Yet my true homeland is not
 
lilac gardens, nor childhood’s
palaces of clouds,
but the undefeated
republic of the mind.
 
Among statues in a museum,
no one says, as I used to,
“Excuse me, I’m foreign.”
No one is foreign.

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