Poetry: Homecoming

By Aya Al-Telmissany

I am locked out of my own home. I found my keys,

but I can't find the right door. Where is Home?

I am tired of sleeping in the mud of my thoughts.

I am not whole. I am always missing from myself

and home is always missing from me. Or am I

missing from it? Is it out there missing me?

Is there a cold bed I used to warm that is looking

for me? I am tired of sleeping in the mud of my thoughts.

The cold is penetrating my soul through the hole

where Home used to sit like an unyielding pharaoh.

My coal-black hair still carries the smell of it

but my heart is in exile.

Home is dallying on the tip of my Arab tongue. I am afraid

it might jump. I write. There is a glimpse of home in my words.

I count the words in all my poems but there are no numbers

and no home. This fleeting sense of belonging, I cannot grasp it.

It won't have me. Yet my knocks are still reverberating

through time, still falling on wooden mirages, still waiting

for the day they hit the cold marble and escort me home.

***

Aya is a poet, translator, and scholar. She has a Master’s degree in English and comparative literature, with a focus on women’s poetry, from the American University in Cairo. She is now pursuing a second Master’s in Interdisciplinary Middle-East Studies at Freie Universität Berlin. She writes poetry in English and French and has been published by Anomalous Press, Poésie en Liberté, and Haus Für Poesie. She also won the Madalyn Lamont Literary Award in 2018 and 2022.