Home (My Sacred Life, Sunday)

This morning, rather than contribute something of my own, I decided to read a piece from a poet whose work I have grown to love in the short period of time since I came to know of him.

My friend Patti Digh is smitten in love with obsessed with fond of Billy Collins and his work--if you have not read of her most-recent adventure which included Billy Collins, you will find it an entertaining story. Her fondness for his work led me to find some of his poems, and I have to admit, she has great taste. I have a book of his poetry on my desk at work for those 2-minute nano-vacations I take during the workday.

Today’s poem is Consolation, a work of Billy Collins which I find states perfectly my own case for staying home when others believe that the rest of the world beckons in a manner which cannot be denied. Oh, yes it can.

That’s not to say that I don’t travel, or that I hate to travel. It is simply the truth, for me, that I love being home. I love the familiar conveniences, the smells of my own habitation, the sense that I am exactly where I belong. Every part of me can rest here.


For your convenience, I am including the written version of the
poem, as well.


Consolation

How agreeable it is not to be touring Italy this summer,
wandering her cities and ascending her torrid hilltowns.
How much better to cruise these local, familiar streets,
fully grasping the meaning of every roadsign and billboard
and all the sudden hand gestures of my compatriots.

There are no abbeys here, no crumbling frescoes or famous
domes and there is no need to memorize a succession
of kings or tour the dripping corners of a dungeon.
No need to stand around a sarcophagus, see Napoleon's
little bed on Elba, or view the bones of a saint under glass.

How much better to command the simple precinct of home
than be dwarfed by pillar, arch, and basilica.
Why hide my head in phrase books and wrinkled maps?
Why feed scenery into a hungry, one-eyed camera
eager to eat the world one monument at a time?

Instead of slouching in a café ignorant of the word for ice,
I will head down to the coffee shop and the waitress
known as Dot. I will slide into the flow of the morning
paper, all language barriers down,
rivers of idiom running freely, eggs over easy on the way.

And after breakfast, I will not have to find someone
willing to photograph me with my arm around the owner.
I will not puzzle over the bill or record in a journal
what I had to eat and how the sun came in the window.
It is enough to climb back into the car

as if it were the great car of English itself
and sounding my loud vernacular horn, speed off
down a road that will never lead to Rome, not even Bologna.
----

Today’s Sacred Sunday, for me, is focused on home, and the
feelings it gives me.