Burrowing Boroughs (A Mama Kat Writing Prompt)

This week one of the Mama Kat prompts was: “Write a poem about your favorite place to be.”

I have been missing New York City so much lately. With that in mind:

Missing

I sit amidst my family, which I left you to create

Their arguments pervade my concentration, they need me to launder clothes and mend frayed emotions

They leave me wondering who I am and why I presumed so much about how my path would go once your skyline was out of my rearview mirror

In my mind, I go to the subway with a book (as my peripheral vision drinks in  the diversity of people surrounding me uttering a world’s worth of languages)

I walk across Central Park from the West Side to the East Side to worship in a place that has housed centuries of worshipers and nourishes my late 20th century soul

I walk ten blocks then ten more, remembering to look up, something the tourists don’t always know to do

I fall asleep with the sounds of traffic, sirens, urban calamities and celebrations and routines that merge into a calmness of tranquil dormant energy

I get pushed past on the sidewalk; griped at by people who assume they are far more important than me, stopped dead in my tracks by the first tulip bloom of spring

Now, I grieve who I was there, anonymous and uniquely me all at the same time

The boroughs burrow into my heart and mind deeper and deeper with every passing year I am back in the Sunshine State

Paula Kiger

Wife of one, Mom of two, Friend of many. My pronouns are she/her/hers.