No Place Like the Home You Don’t Know

How can you go home

When you don’t know where it is?

The map I see in textbooks

is unfamiliar yet comforting

Like meeting a cousin for the first time

Who looks just like you

I study it

And can only dream and pretend

That I know the route back

I study eyes and noses and lips

Trying to find my face

in strangers in photographs

Did you know that God is a woman?

But did you know that she is also Black?

I saw her clothed in white fabric

That hugged her curves

That flowed abundantly

Like rainwater down verdant hills

She was tall

And her skin glowed darkly

With a metallic finish

I don’t know where I am from

And so I claim

Dozens of languages

Cultures and traditions

Hoping in my blindness

Maybe once

I brush the fingertips of my ancestors