To Find My First Homeland

To Find My First Homeland
© Surazeus
2018 08 04

In the quiet of his house after dawn
Samson sings the first lines he memorized
of the French national anthem to himself.

"Nothing like singing the first several lines
of the French national anthem to oneself
in the quiet of the house after dawn
while washing dishes after eating breakfast
of cornflakes with bananas drenched in honey.
As if I were thinking of the opening scene
of a novel I am never going to write."

Samson laughs and walks out to his backyard
and gazes at the immense azure sky
that shimmers over the lush hills of Georgia.

"History is written with blood of the losers,
when warriors dip quills in blood of the people
they kill with arrows and bullets of greed,
because not more that three centuries ago
my ancestors lived far across the sea,
building wagons and cultivating wheat
in fields around the castle of hard stone
where the lazy man wearing crown of gold
feasted well on the labor of their hands.
They rebelled against his authority,
that he claimed came from invisible god,
and sailed large woods ships across the wild sea
to invade this land of lush rolling hills
where they killed the people who had lived here
ten thousand years, then built themselves new homes.
What should I do to rectify this crime?
Can I go back to the island of Britain,
to reclaim the castles where they all ruled,
or should I follow their path farther back
across the long migration of their quest,
over Spain, France, Germany, Italy,
Greece, Romania, Bulgaria, Galatia,
Scythia, Assyria, Sumeria, to Egypt?
All nations of the world first sprang from Egypt,
migrating outward along curving coasts
deep into tropical jungles to China,
up winding rivers into snowy mountains
to spread across plains of Russia and Europe,
over blistering deserts of Africa,
till every valley of this spinning world
was colonized by the Children of Amen.
How far backward across this crowded world
should I return to find my first homeland?
Deep in dream memory I can see it now,
that little river valley in Ethiopia
where the first mother of all human beings
first expressed her thoughts with sound of her mouth
to signify ripe fruit glowing in sunlight
with the smacking of her lips like a kiss.
Thus Hama began the song of our hearts
that we still sing with every word we speak,
chanting harmonious sounds to signify
concepts of objects, qualities, and actions
that we perceive to design whole world view
based on ontology of hungry hope.
Yet farther back I follow her ancestors
swinging tree to tree from peaks of Guilin
where we first climbed high to touch the blue sky
as small furred mice evolving into monkeys
when that meteor wiped out the dinosaurs,
so we began where the sun is born at dawn
and followed its light west around the world
sixty million years from monkey to man.
So now I want to migrate to Guilin,
returning to the homeland of our species,
and climb the highest peak in swirling mist
to dream the whole history of humankind
I can encode in the letters of Nabu."

Plucking tomatoes from flourishing plants
to eat with his Fettuccine Alfredo,
Samson watches the yellow butterfly
float lazily in streaming rays of light.