Featured Poem 9/19/05
Returning HomeYou do something one day, and the next,
and it becomes your life, she thinks looking
out from the kitchen. It’s two years since
she left Atlanta, quit her job to help her
ailing mother. One hundred five, since Edwin,
her grandfather, bought this grocery, now
a bar, and the wordless dialogue of work
began. But she knows we’re worth most
to ourselves and to others, where we’re
most ourselves, contented and at home.
Out the window rock croppings rise like
old gravestones. There’s nothing and then
there’s something. Wind across the hills
at night. A fragrance of leaves. Or, in the
distance, the sound of returning geese.
John Lehman
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