How to express this indefinable quality
of otherness, this sense of being
three generations and three steps removed
from home-that-is-not-home?

Die Heimat (italics are apologies)
does not exist. I'm caught between
the songs & prayers that soothed me
gently sleepwards, and
the language I can write in.

I turn to poetry. I still hold hope
that somewhere in this tension
between meanings, between forms, between
half-glimpsed translucencies
it will at last come clear. I know
the work to build a home is all my own.