Jane Schapiro – Innisfree Poetry Journal

Coming Home

For the sake of romance I wish I could point
to our first kiss or embrace,
instead I offer that afternoon nap
following our wedding day.
Resting on our hotel bed we were conversing
when sleep like a khamsin swept through the room.
It wasn’t until after our nap that I realized
how restless my lone self had been.
Like a refugee, I had been moving around,
trying to find a safe spot on the map.
I thought of Odysseus—
not his wanderings or strength—
but the sleep he fell into on the ship’s deck,
that balmy tremor-less, death-like trance,
his journey’s-end calm.
Lying next to you that day,
I felt the drift of Ithaca’s sea
then closed my eyes
and sailed on home.

Jane Schapiro is the author of the 2020 Nautilus Book Award Winner Warbler (Kelsay Books, 2020), Let The Wind Push Us Across (Antrim House 2017), Tapping This Stone (Washington Writers’ Publishing House, 1995) and the nonfiction book Inside a Class Action: The Holocaust and the Swiss Banks (University of Wisconsin, 2003). Mrs. Cave’s House won the 2012 Sow’s Ear Poetry Chapbook competition. Her work has appeared in The American Scholar, Black Warrior Review, The Gettysburg Review, Poetry East, Prairie Schooner, The Southern Review, Verse Daily.