I'm Home. | a poem

Picture by Owentando Zantsi

I missed you too.

He says as she enters

the gates of the

ancestral realm

years from now.

She looks different now,

he thinks.

She looks older,

wiser and tattered

in the scars she

carried through

her life.

She's no longer that

sixteen year old he

had left crying at the

side of her bed.

Or the little girl

he raised and

loved.

No

She was a woman now.

And yet,

as grown as she was,

she still cried like an infant.

Because to her,

he was him.

Same smile,

same voice

Same clothes,

same eyes.

Nothing about him

had changed since

that day.

Nothing.

And as he uttered

 the four words she’d longed

 to hear for so long,

 they twisted inside her.

 So much that, at last,

 she remembered she could breathe.

I'm home, she said.

Finally.