“Our homes are on our backs and don’t forget it.”
- Molly Peacock

My son riddled me the other day:
Is a turtle without a shell naked or homeless?...
Neither; it’s dead.

Unkind, perhaps, but true - the turtle
is inseparable from what we call its “home” –
rip it away, and you take its vertebrae.

We carry ourselves wherever we go,
whether we live in a hundred-acre estate
or three dirty quilts and a fridge box.

Like a backpack, like a shell -
we hunch under the weight of shortcomings
only to put them down when we arrive.

11/03/2011

Author's Note: Day 2 prompt: Write a poem that starts with an epigraph.

Posted on 11/04/2011
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