Home is where the heart is:
a tin can tied to a stray dog.

The only truth is home truth:
preserves on the winter shelf.

Those who carry their homes on their backs
live for hundreds of years,
moving inch by inch from birth to lagoon.

-Ingrid de Kok

******

Home is where one was
 when five or six years old

when cognition dawned and
the world started making sense

that there was more than candy
and ice creams and more than

the warmth of mother's lap.
More than Barnie and bikes

and more than loving dad.
You were the maker of

your own world. The world
you carry within yourself.

- Ravi Kopra

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Ground wave

Just below the cottage door
our moraine stairway of lemon trees,
strelitzia quills and oleander shrub
steps to the sea and deeper terraces.
The warming wind, concertina on the slope,
coaxes open the bulbul’s throat,
the figtree’s testicular green globes
and camellia’s white evening flux.

Behind the house we feel
the mountain’s friction against our backs.
Deep fissures are predicted by the almanac,
earth and trees heaving to the shore.
Scorpions come in at night
for cool killings on the flagstone floor.

-Ingrid de Kok

******

In front of our farm house
papaya, mango and leechee trees
swarmed by green parrots with red beaks
coming down from mountains in Haldwani.
Scalding hot summer heat and noon
but cool evening winds and smiling moon.

Glow worms in darker nights flitted
filling the air like falling stars from skies.
Early in the morning the roosters calls,
the parrots chirping on mango trees
and mom coming to my cot I slept in 
in the front yard under open skies
and telling me: get up you lazy bum
it's time for morning walk and prayer.

- Ravi Kopra