Far-Sickness

She posts her pictures online for all to see

Her adventures in a foreign land;

Pictures of buildings and rocks and statues

And flowers and trees,

Places and things I’ve never seen

But ache for as if exiled from home,

My desolate soul heartsick for a place

I know in my bones I belong to

As surely as I know every curve and edge

Of my own face in the mirror,

Though I’ve never once stepped foot

Upon its shores.

 

 

**Photo courtesy of Beth Teliho and poem inspired by her trip to England and a different photo that didn’t work out as well as I thought it would;

Title inspired by this definition:

fernweh: Being homesick for a place you’ve never been to; an ache for distant places; literal translation: far-sickness.

 

Mending A Broken Heart

I held his heart in my hands

In pieces shattered, a broken land.

“Can you fix it?” he’d asked

While I stared at the impossible task.

“I’ll do what I can,” I said,

Placing a kiss on his forehead.

I sat and pondered and tried to start

But how best to mend his broken heart?

With needle and thread to keep it together?

Not glue; too weak for changes in weather…

Metal would give it strength,

But time and rust would wear its length.

So I thought and then thought some more

Until the answer came as if called for.

I began putting the pieces back one by one,

Working throughout the daytime sun

And on through the darkening night,

Continuing on despite

The pain in my back and bleeding fingertips,

Making sure there’d be no rips.

Then one day I was done,

And I smiled at the war I’d won.

For when you breathed life into their chests

You knew, for them, you’d never rest.

So when my son’s heart was broken

I listened to the words spoken

From my own, and heeded what they’d said,

Then gave him my whole one instead.

And with the love I’ve never denied

I sewed up the pieces of his then closed it inside

Myself.