This is the place

We stopped, somewhere in time,
looked around, the country bizarre,
the landscape mutating, the muted
people making signs in our direction.

Night came and even the gestures
receded, the voices hid behind doors;
our senses, we saved for our own use,
huddled together as often as we breathed.

Life seemed fixed by then – it would
always be you and me and the other.
The trees could care less. They grew
whether we slept under them or not.

And leaves fell, and then snow,
on our hot skin, took on our shape
as it did everyone’s, even if we
felt the chill so much the deeper.

I do remember a child’s embarrassed smile,
and the nuzzling of a dog, but the alphabet
was unkind, the rooms we finally moved
into hugged us so unfriendly.

We wondered, in the frozen night,
if any place would truly have us,
for we had little worth knowing,
and nothing much to sell.

We, with old customs, habits,
found ourselves face to face
with new laws enforced by stares
and the flip of a razor-edged finger.

We leaned toward home
but our roots start spreading here,
and we sounded like we sound,
a crime in most neighborhoods.

The borders may be far but those
already here were borders in themselves,
though they crawled up on the shoulders
of their own, who too were once unwanted.

And now, the memory of our homeland
cracks and totters in the brain,
our tales replaced by new tales,
our visions cussed and blinded.

There are those who would
set us afire if they could,
or drown us in their oceans or
mail us back with postage due.

But the spirit, despite its seizures,
troubles itself to go on,
to find substance in what melts away,
motion where the legs are chained,

hands to open doors, dreams,
vivid enough to be seen in daylight,
voices to repeat, over and over,
This is the place… this is the place.

John Grey is an Australian poet and US resident recently published in New World Writing, River And South and Tenth Muse. His latest books, Subject Matters, Between Two Fires, and Covert are available through Amazon. John is a regular contributor to Dodging the Rain and has work forthcoming from Paterson Literary Review, White Wall Review and Cantos.