Lopamudra Banerjee

At Home: Lines written in self-isolation

“Perhaps home is not a place but an irrevocable condition.”

James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room

(I)

In hushed dreams, ‘Welcome Home’

This morning I woke up to the smell of the stale night in my warm bed,
I woke up, as I always do, seeing in my blurred dreams the threadbare art
Of homes within this home, built within me, the structures,
Plots and rhymes of the snapshots of those homes,
And I know not, what they become, in their unbecoming.

(II)
Remember, the distance between us

8 am, bubbling hot lemon ginger tea, the clock chimes
The bone-deep echoes of a self-same life.
The pervasive rhythm of skin and flesh functioning,
Cooped up in tiny square holes.
One sharp nudge, and I would moan, like an ocean.
But we are odd, eccentric planets, distanced by feet
Which would perhaps make us recognize our voices,

Our breaking apart, our ‘unbecoming’ within our homes.

(III)

‘You took me once to an older part of earth I’d never seen;
Joy Harjo, ‘Nandia’

The last time I cut myself open in all the homes within the home
It was an older part of the earth of my home I’ve hungered for,
Memories of four walls and the desolate search melting on my tongue.
See, the sky falling backwards somewhere over a damp terrace,
The storms seemed, ‘it gonna take all of us.’
And now, under the grey, looming sky, long nights of dreaming
About homes within this home in this self-same cycle of life
Makes for a grand plan of escape, and I hope to be alive
Looking for our burnt embers
Of bygone nights, distanced irrevocably.

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