homeland haiku

I’m having one of those days of sheer indulgence…been reading all morning, just slurped down a coffee ice cream/Milo/banana & peanut butter smoothie, lost internet connection but managed to restore it myself when the Verizon rep proved useless…and now I just found a fun haiku exercise from You Know…that Blog. My fellow Canadian is asking folks to write a haiku that reflects your feelings about home—and today, for those of you who might not know, is Canada Day. You probably already know that I’m ambivalent about my homeland; I love Canada, am proud to be Canadian, but for a long time now I haven’t thought of Canada as “home.” It’s a complicated term/feeling/concept…and let’s face it: most of us have more than one home, right? And you can be AT home, but not FEEL at home…if feeling “at home” is to feel beloved, wanted, valued, safe. I’m just reading Down to the Bone by Mayra Lazara Dole, and her protagonist has been thrown OUT of her home for being caught in a lesbian relationship. My father insisted in his unfinished memoir that as an immigrant you can’t ever go back home…but I think the idea is to write a “fun” haiku, so let’s see if I can lighten up a bit:

Canada shaped me;
Brooklyn restored my faith in
possibility