Home II (collective poem)
Written and performed by: Pieter Odendaal (South Africa), Antosh Wojcik (UK), and Sara Sibai (Lebanon)
As part of the International Talking Doorsteps project, Roundhouse, UK.
==== Lyrics ===
S: Home is 5am calls to prayer
It’s a shut up dubstep
P: It’s coffee and a cigarette to start my day,
A: grilled cheese, mum-style.
S: Sunday morning mana’eesh,
P: koeksister and milktart,
A: homemade strawberry milkshakes before bed.
S: It’s occasional bloodstained sheets,
P: the spine of a familiar book pushed into the VCR
A: playing coke-can badminton while the neighbor’s weed whacking,
S: and jumping straight through the middle of a trampoline
…dad in nothing but pants.
S: Home is where mum has long conversations on the phone every Saturday morning repeating the same stories to all the women in the family.
P: It’s us staying awake throughout the night, monopoly, movie marathon, the rising sun on our faces.
S: It’s when stepdad introduces me as his daughter,
P: It’s my father crying at my first piano recital at sixteen; it’s the first time he clearly held love in his eyes.
Home is in the eyes.
S: Home is in the words of our mothers. My mum says I’m just like my father…
A: my mum tells me the world doesn’t need any more people like my father
S: …to which there is always door slamming slamming and windows shattering.
A: I throw the drum kit down the staircase…
P: it was the best solo you ever did.
S: My sister and I used to study by candlelight, competing over who could run their fingers through the fire the slowest.
P+A: How can you tattoo a floor with hair straighteners?
S: My sister holds her breath so I can cry it out for the both of us.
A: My brother loses his pelvis after laughing at me pelting the door with plastic meatballs.
P: It’s my sister asking if I’d to join her for Yoga X…
A: to which I almost always respond: no thanks!
P: And the one time I say yes, she smiles and says,
A: actually, I’ve moved on to a more advanced workout, would you still like to join?
S: …to which I almost always respond: no thanks!
P: My brother and I are like oil and water.
A: I sleep in half a bunk bed I shared with my brother. He’s no longer below me,
running his feet in the slats, playing the sound a roller coaster makes;
his half is in his room, accumulating sweat and lovers.
P: Home is digging into what the mattress teaches of love,
it’s reading poems written with fingers on each others’ backs
where every creased line and every freckle is studied.
A: Spaghetti legs wrapped together in silence, fingers locked half asleep and toes meeting each other for the first time.
S: It’s reversing time so we could keep our hands weaved for longer, our hair porcupines; it’s watching the sky move through our bodies.
P: We make ropes from the clothes we’ve taken off each other,
A: they’re short…
P: …but long enough to climb out of the world for a while.
S: It sits in your throat like a lump
This is where I’ve learnt forgiveness…
P: …it took you seven years
S: and when I finally mustered the courage to say I forgive you…
A: …or I’m sorry…
S: there was no response.
P: Maybe that is forgiveness?
A: Maybe it’s realizing you carry your past.
P+A: You have to let go.
P: Home is a web of umbilical chords connecting us to the earth, stretching across landscapes like arteries on an old man’s arm,
S: it’s being in tune with the wind, with the pattern of falling leaves
It is where rage is lighting in the chest and sea sirens screaming at walls.
A: It’s a thousand pigeons turning their wings in unison, a thousand languages meeting half way between,
P: our cells ceaseless explosions of mitochondria, we carry the ferocity of the sun
our porous bones
A: our spongy flesh
S: our watertight skins
P: that border between us
S+A: and the rest.
Unision: Home is living on the border between.