Homecoming

22 April 2020

https://poems.culturing.net/2020/04/homecoming/

Awaking comes in turns,
    the day is bright before it burns.

I walk down streets I never knew.
They are familiar, but I, the knower, have changed.
I did not know what little I knew.
Maybe this is what poets mean by recurrence,
why they return so often to the same things.
I did not know the familiar streets
because I, the knower, had not yet been changed.
But what can bring such a change?
An encounter, a question, another knower?
To know is to be known and vice versa.
This means the streets must know me,
and where the streets have no names
there is nothing to know.
But this is all begging the question,
why knowledge?
Because I, the knower, have not yet been changed.
Maybe this is why poets recur and recur.
If change comes it comes only for now, not forever,
and so I walk down streets I never knew,
the same streets, but I, the knower, have changed,
and so have they.