From California to Louisiana
No more the mountains rising blue and gray,
nor oceans crashing near to shore on rocks.
Goodbye to moderate climes for now I’ll say
and pack up all my dreams in a moving box.
Migration destination: all is flat.
Some trees—the oaks—are all that rise up high,
and cypress grow, with bottoms swelling fat
in water; humid heat in air and sky.
The ocean’s near, yet far. It lacks a shore,
but rather wetlands give transition slow.
Alike my understanding local lore
the folks here tell, so much is left to know.
The strange may grow familiar, year by year.
Yet where is home? It’s neither there nor here.
Mark F. DeWitt is an ethnomusicologist, amateur musician, and emerging poet based in Oakland, California, although parts of him still linger in Louisiana, Massachusetts, and Ohio. His poems have appeared in The New Verse News and publications of the Litquake Foundation and the Society for Ethnomusicology. He is also author of an ethnography, Cajun and Zydeco Dance Music in Northern California: Modern Pleasures in a Postmodern World (University Press of Mississippi).
