finding "home"

What Lawrence Hill said about how a person can never really go home stuck with me. Of course, I’d heard this turn of phrase many times before, but I think hearing it again within that context triggered a whole new reflective analysis of how I feel about my home and the prospect of it losing its familiarity. Then, Langston Hughes’s poem, The Negro Speaks of Rivers happened along and struck a chord. I don’t think this poem is necessarily about going home in either the literal sense, or in the figurative, death-related sense we’ve discussed in class. But it does attach comfort, familiarity, and depth of soul, even in the midst of the time’s turmoil and grief, to an element of nature that is symbolic of change, passing time, and perseverance. In turn, I found the poem itself to be comforting. I think one of the poem’s underlying messages was that the men and women who were uprooted from Africa had to find their homes in places that were foreign and unfriendly, but which could not help but to hold the essential familiarity of enduring nature. I was comforted not only because the speaker seemed to find peace in his “knowing” of rivers, but also because I learned a new way to think of “home,” which provides for the possibility of never leaving it to begin with, no matter how much distance I cover.