A Blue House
As I move this week, I'm reminded of the power of home and a sense of place.
This poem was written about the house I lived in while teaching 10th grade English on the prairie of South Dakota.
I want to know you – silent places of my house, dark shadows and smudged corners - bruised where walls meet.
I am someone who unknowingly whispers to you and, through sun-rays shelved from the window, I speak to you, the outermost place I can reach, the porous holder of my quiet existence, the cratered dwelling of small night-thoughts, of early morning hurting.
Thank you to the four walls of this house and the openness with which you receive my nightly exhales, my openness to the Sleep World. It is you who sees my Vulnerability in sleep, hears the released breaths of this moon wanderer, this night-sleep mourner, a man who wakes with a drum in his chest to again triangulate his journey forward within these patient right angles and plaster burdened sheet-rock.
You have become extraordinary, small house – for in the night, in the morning, in the twilight moment when I’m not sure I should turn on the lights – you are a conduit of living, all good and true hours happen in you – my blue house –
My home.