Homecoming

                                
                                                                 Homecoming by Jane Aucourt

Bare Boards, bare windows:
Home once more.
Strange to come home
Through a stranger's door;

Strange to step back
Over sunlit dust
To a childhood kitchen
Thick with rust,

To know where the cup
And the kitchen spoons
Arrange themselves
In the afternoons;

To trace in the fall
Of cobwebbed light
The shape of childhood's
Second sight.

Strange, to return
Adult, bereft:
But even stranger
To have left.