To Live in Exile - fran claggett-holland

[Lawrence Robinson]

To Live in Exile

To live in exile.
To live an exile,
is to hold the memory
of the motherland in the heart.
Blood ties the exile to
a home remembered.
With time, the blood thins,
becomes water, becomes
the ocean between.

The separation complete,
the memory is just a faded photograph
in an album, you can almost
remember the faces, but they blur
in indistinction.

Still, memory is jogged
by the smallest things—a line
of poetry, a gnarled redbud tree,
the touch of skin under hands that
smooth out tensions,
restore the balance
between two sides
of one world.

	- fran claggett-holland