Filtering sawdust...

Landscape with Figures

Carlos Bulosan

Homeward again under foreign stars,

history was a strange gush of wind from memory

that came to echo waterfalls of those years:

home to find the place lost among

galaxies of signs. The hills were gone. The river

trail was forgotten. . . Trying to remember meadowlark

and those who perished in the vanishing land

(bones in the earth where our parents died poor),

the journey fell into heavy tides of flowing

scorn that echoed and reechoed time there.



The sun was most unkind to the place:

history: names of men: patterns of life:

all that distant floodtide heaved and moved,

breaking familiar names that immortal tongues

clipped for the heart to cry, "Home is a foreign address,

every step toward it is a step toward three hundred years

of exile from the truth. . ."

It was not homeward

to the first known land, nor escape

to white sea sprays blossoming on inland shore,

nor love leaping the boundaries naked in the soul,

but a vast heritage of war and destruction breaking

too soon for the living and willing to die.



Life is a foreign language. Every man mispronounced it . . .

(1942)