The Things We Carry Home
by Hassan Ismail Adekunle
We carry home
in strange containers:
a voice saved
inside an old recording,
the smell of rain
caught in a shirt,
a sentence our father said
before he became
a memory.
We carry the places
that could not keep us.
The road follows quietly,
hiding beneath our shoes,
and every unfamiliar room
contains a window
through which we remember
another sky.
Sometimes home is not
the house we return to.
Sometimes it is the woman
who still leaves the light on
when we are late.
Sometimes it is a name
spoken from another room.
Sometimes it is the taste
of something cooked
by hands we can no longer hold.
Years pass.
Walls are repainted.
Trees are cut down.
The old street learns
new footsteps.
Yet somewhere inside us,
a door remains open
to the person we were
before leaving.
At night,
when the world grows quiet,
we enter that room again.
We touch the walls.
We listen.
And for a moment,
nothing has changed.
The dead are still laughing.
The young are still waiting.
The road is still long.
And we are still carrying
what we thought
we had left behind.