I Know a Place*

I’ve come to know a place I can call home
It’s work and love and dust and green growing things
It is the smell of loam and clean air, skunks and eye-burning turkey poop
It is trembling gnarled hands and late-night crisis telephone rings
It is a bone-jolting place of hair-pin horseshoe twists and turns and veers
It is a place so bird-filled, it sings
It is a place where grandeur and quiet and wonder fill the sky at night
It is a place where the breeze blows so strong the laundry on the line has wings
It is the smell of casseroles, the stiff feel of hung dry linen, a still place
A place where God takes the orange and red flame of fall and just flings
I’ve come to know a home, a sacred space.


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Modeled on Rosie Miles’ Blessing for a Home, an exercise out of Joy Mead’s Making Peace in Practice and Poetry.  The 1st, 2nd & last lines are from Miles’ Blessing.