I’ve been thinking about it for a long time
and it was rather questions than answers
that multiplied

Is home a place?
That straat and that numèro?
Or rather these people
who bath me in kisses and questions
as soon as I return do domu?
Is it perhaps a kind of landscape?
The way sparkling sunrays fall on a strong spruce?
Is it that dragging drizzle reluctantly dulling the day?
A sound of seagulls having their funny debate?
It is that pink soup my grandma used to serve
with a pajda of at once crunchy and soft bread?
Is it these sweet words on the tongue
pronounced with the akcent and intonacja
of people who saw me grow?

The puzzling mixture
of comfort and shame that defines
that place where you’re from
turned into some kind of
all-encompassing nostalgia

In search for home,
I went to a church for an after-mass talk –
the mass and the talk, how I hated them back home
In search for home,
I felt like saying santé to a homeless man
drinking Karpackie by the Carrefour at Buyl
In search for home,
I greeted workers repairing a pavement –
the kind who whistled when I was a short-skirt 16
In search for home,
I went for a winter walk by the seaside
thousands of windy needles biting my bare face

In search for home,
I planted meadow flowers on my balcony
none of which ever grew except from one:
a tall cornflower, bleuet, korenbloem, chaber
thick and strong
resistant to winds caressing the last floor
my mother’s favorite flower
that instantly made me feel home

(Maja Ułasik)