A tectonic shift.
The ground falls away beneath my feet.
Trapped between two countries, I have no home at all.
Floating in space, unable to breathe,
Crushed by conflicting desires,
I find no place to go, no place to leave.
I am sacked by sadness and a desperate fear
That rip apart my old viscera like the Bird of Death.
One large death has already passed,
And what remains to me is mourning.
Only the details –
The cleaning up, emptying out, throwing away –
Oh, why hang on to hope?
That’s always the last damn thing to go.
..
Sandra Shaw Homer has lived in Costa Rica for 27 years, where she has taught languages and worked as a translator and environmental activist. For several years she wrote a regular column, “Local Color,” for the English-language weekly The Tico Times. Her writing has appeared in several print and on-line literary and travel venues, as well as her own blog, writingfromtheheart.net. Her first travel memoir, Letters from the Pacific, received excellent Kirkus and Publishers Weekly reviews. A brief memoir of survival, The Magnificent Dr. Wao, is available as a Kindle Book, and a second travel memoir, Journey to the Joie de Vivre was released in 2015.
I am not a silent poet 