Home by Yesha Townsend [Video]

I’ve taught poetry to youth for about four years now. One thing I’ve always instilled in my mentees is how therapeutic poetry is and how cyclical our writing can be. We tend to write the same poem over and over again, in many different iterations and maybe packaged in new metaphor and dressed in contrasting thematic undertones. But, more or less, we write the thing we’re dealing with to heal. I lost my mom at 19, right around the time I started taking my writing more seriously. Afterwards all of my poems were about my mom, and then all of my poems were about loss, and then about abandonment and then about displacement. I noticed that I was writing around the same-ish sort of theme with slight variations. Initially I figured that my writing cycle was attributed to my mom - and that every variation of my poems were about me dealing with the loss of her. It wasn’t until I looked deeper into my pieces that I found something else.

Humans are creatures of habit and habitat. Our main goal in life is is to seek shelter, and once we have it we strive to maintain it. Home as a construct is that shelter. Home in it’s purest form is comfort and warmth, and we as humans seek constantly a home in our respective lives. What became illuminous for me was that I realized I had not been in the cycle of writing about the loss of my mother, I had been in the cycle of writing about the loss of a home. Essentially my mother was the first home I ever had and the most constant one in my life, and in losing her I lost the physical form of that home that I had in her. I wrote this poem ‘Notes on a Home’ in an effort to further explore the idea of humans and our relationships with homes. We have autonomy to define what home is and we have the reflex to seek our respective homes, day to day. Our lives are us essentially finding homes in all the things that we love, that interest us and that comfort us. Our lives are us essentially seeking shelter and comfort, seeking home constantly. In whatever forms that they may come in. I realized in writing this poem all the times I’ve found homes and lost them, searched for them and reveled in them. This poem is a celebration to all the homes I’ve had and to the many more I hope to inhabit.