Going Home - Beverly Koepplin

I wonder where my grandmother’s heart went

when it went home.

Surely not back to the mother country

where, as an orphaned girl,

she trundled carts of soldiers’ 

bodies through the streets.

Surely not back to the farm 

in the North Dakota countryside

where she spent her days

spinning in the dust,

like a lost whirling dervish, 

never finding her way,

blown like the thistles 

across the brown flat lands.

I don’t know that this 

kind, gentle heart ever found a home.

I wonder where my mother’s heart went

When it went home.

Surely not back to that farm 

where she worked from dawn to dusk

minding her father and her brothers 

and the livestock, ever toiling,

doing her homework by the light 

of the kerosene lamp

and hoping that the words she read 

would somehow carry her away,

a magic carpet ride to a world 

where there was sometimes surcease.

I suspect her heart went back to Montana

because, like me, she never found 

a true home in California.

I wonder where my heart will go

when it goes home.

I know it will not be North Dakota 

for I, too, was lost there.

I know it will not be the San Joaquin Valley, 

where I never found my way, either.

Both are flat lands that run to the 

edges of the earth and leave me nowhere to hide.

It might be San Francisco 

as somewhere in the fog by the sea, I found myself.

It could be this valley where the mountains 

guard the precious vines and me.

But I know that my heart 

will go back to Montana, too,

and my mother and I will sit by the shores 

of Lake Como and listen to peace.

                        ***