| My Home, My Home! |
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My Home, My Home!
New York Cesar Chelala
My home, I want to come back to my home
I don’t care how broken it stands;
I just want a single wall
and I will rebuild it, says the old man,
a grandfather of three sons, five grandchildren
“I want to restart my family,” he pleads
--he doesn’t know, he cannot know—
that both his house and his family
no longer exist.
He sits by the roadside,
on a rock beneath a silent sky,
and weeps.
Exhausted, he curls into sleep,
a small bag --all his belongings--
clutched to his chest.
Yet he is a man of resolve.
He will go back and start all over again,
but he will have to do it alone,
the last survivor
of a vanished home.
So many dreams crushed,
so many lives that are no more.
Cesar
Chelala, a New York writer, is a co-winner of an Overseas Press Club of
America award, and two national journalism awards from Argentina. Illustration by Paola Bilancieri |
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