The Old Country - Dec 18 2022

 

The Old Country

Dec 18 2022

They call it “the old country”.

Although they never really left.

And have grown old, as well;

not just the grandparents themselves,

but how they remember it.

An old country

that no longer exists.

I, on the other hand

speak the language here,

am not terribly dated,

and shouldn't feel out of place.

But who doesn't have an old country

deep down inside,

a landscape

imprinted on their DNA?

The one place in the world

I feel truly at home.

So how sad

it's no longer here.

That it exists

only in the past,

and I find myself

in a foreign land as well;

a hot-house plant

uprooted from its native soil.

Nothing radical.

But enough of a shift

to feel ill at ease.

Where new customs

catch me by surprise,

the latest fads pass me by,

and language changes

too fast to keep track.

Where young people, who know little of the past

anxiously plan for a future

in a troubled world

I feel ever more doubtful about.

The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there,” wrote L.P. Hartley in his 1953 novel “The Go-Between.”