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My Hope to Belong

Author: Aila Schafer
Year: Hope

When I left, I didn’t look back
Into the safe distance
Of a melancholic past,
Because I knew
I don’t belong to my yesterdays

I don’t want to belong
To a nation
With manmade boundaries
Or to a place
Built by anyone else

I want to belong
Into the language I live in
The words and stories, I experience
And to the places
My travels take me

I want to belong
To every strangeness
I encounter far away
And to the permanence of home
I am looking for

I want to experience nature
With its sweet rain falling
Changing the colour of the path I walk
Turning streams into torrents
Painting beams of colour into the sky

I want to get lost in the valleys
And their undisturbed silence
Where dark nights are the brightest
And stars let us walk without falling
In quiet completeness

I want to walk along ridges, climb mountains
Break through the clouds
And for each of these hills and trees
To become part of the story
That I belong into

When the wild wind whispers
I will listen
I will hear its stories in my own way
And if they are filled
With yearnings, memories and yesterdays
I will know to continue
But if they beckon my heart and my soul
If they speak of dreams and joy and today
If they let me close my eyes
In solace and comfort
I will pause, spellbound
In the sanctuary of the rustling tree

I will know to no longer be my own secret
Like a changeling
Under the softness of the moon
Surreptitiously placed into the world
And I will know that here is the home I belong

But why here?
And why now?
Because these hills
Have turned eternities of strangeness
Into words of a language so familiar
Where translations do not matter
And muted tongues are the most eloquent sorcerers
So why not?
I am here now, it is
Where fractions of my story
Belong into yours
And yours into mine
It is where I belong
So, I wonder
Will you let me stay?