Landlocked one leg, one leg seaborne;
halved by double consciousness; native
of no man’s land; son of the wild honey hunter
who shops syrup at Smith’s; untranslation-
haunted; I write of Mother in my not-mother
tongue…
On my window, Apa appears alive:
“Siddhartha left the palace to be reborn
under the bodhi. Lotus is mud moon rain.
Breathed lip to lip, every story is nomadic.”
Migrate from migrāre: to pass into a new condition.
But what form could release the one born in bondage:
Nativus — a native of a foreign land?
A bird of passage,
a pilgrim — a peregrine — I will fly, nostalgic
for root — nostos: return home, algos: pain.
/
Uprooted route? Algos: pain, nostos: return home.
Nostalgic, the pilgrim flies, how, a peregrine home.
Stray bird to sage, illegible to illegal, passage to blank page…
What more forms must the monk suffer to form one home?
Migraines, sleepwalking, faints, amnesia, breathless breaths…
But no medic arrives to mouth-breathe on his new condition: Home.
Show us, O Awakened One, who picked thorn over throne,
how the lotus remains, in mud, in monsoon, in moon, home.
Apa believed in the window, the sun on the other side.
I write to my mother in a ghost tongue The haunt is on: Home!
Wild honey hunter who shoplifts bees at Smith’s?
Mistranslation of the imagined fatherland: Forgive son, Home.
Home, alive, valley of fireflies, doubled by each half-light —
Sea landlocked, land seaborne; reborn, a burning: home.
Samyak Shertok is an assistant professor of creative writing at Hendrix College and the inaugural Hughes Fellow in Poetry at Southern Methodist University.
This poem appears in the March 2025 issue of Deseret Magazine. Learn more about how to subscribe.