My Home, My Home!

My Home, My Home!




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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