The City of Marquette Art Week has come to a new tradition of opening each year’s festival with a poem. This poem is always inspired by the annual theme and written by the most recent City Writer of the Year recipient. In the case of 2023, the inspiring theme is HOME and the author is the local novelist and poet B.G. Bradley.

Join us for the Art Week Opening Sunrise Ceremony, June 19th at 5:45am where B.G. Bradley will recite his original work. Sunrise painting in title image is ‘First Light’ by Catherine Brunet

Home

Where were you born? They’ll ask,
as though being born isn’t enough of a task.
They want to know where.
Where is your home, they’ll say?
Hey you, who are you from home?
How far are you from home?
Did you stay, did you roam?
Have you ever been long alone? Or never?
Was there ever a favorite food you had?
And who cooked it for you?
Don’t be clever now, tell us, tell us?

So maybe you swear and wonder.
Or say a prayer in thanks for some old street or road.
Swear alliegence to some village or city, some country, some water.
Maybe you ought to be able to name just one place.
Maybe you think it’s a disgrace to have too many homes.

So, were you born somewhere along one of these streets?
Were you treated well and did you learn the smells of Holidays?
Were you in a daze and only realized you were alive, only came alive
when you were 25 or 26, when your first lover said goodbye with a final kiss
and you were broken and grabbed hold of some root, swam in some
water and decided that you ought to have a place you could call on
in such situations? And found it was right there or here all along?

Where is your home?

Were you born at home right away, with your mother’s first greeting?
Do you feel only a fleeting connection to the playgrounds where you played,
and the rocks and ropes and schools you skipped or failed to skip?
To the old baritone voices singing badly in the living room, then laughing.
To your brothers sometimes mean jokes and your sisters reclusive ways?
Were you right away enamored to the ways of family? Or did that ever happen?
Were you forever snapping your fingers with wishes to circle the world
and never come back?

Where is your home?

So how many friends did you have, do you have?
People will right out with things like that
when they ask you where you were born,
where is your home?

The audacity of that, you think to yourself.
But then, you realize that if you asked some cat or dog where home was,
and waited a while they would eventually just walk a certain way,
around some fence, across some yard and show you.
And you deny that there is such a place for you, perhaps,
but you’re kidding yourself. And you know that.

Where is your home?

Oh, it may not be here.
It may not even have a damned door, but there’s some place
that you call community, even if it’s, of one.
There’s some place where you’ve had loads of fun,
laughed with others in some pick up bed,
went night running under clotheslines all in fright and frolic,
got into a fight and won or lost, when you were just small
or later tall and brazen and vitriolic.
Or maybe you were in a ballgame there, played a recital,
felt vital and bold, once there, for hours or days, or months
or years or between the moons or under those steering stars
over some Great Lake.
Maybe that’s your take on home.

Or maybe there were cars or motorcycles or leaky old boats
that you remember from some milieu of mind and soul.
Maybe there was a place, is a place where you always feel whole.

Or maybe
there was some place where you were told a lot of rules.
And maybe you broke them all, hell, I don’t know.
But you still go there, don’t you?
You go to where your heart is.
Maybe to where your art is
and your old loves and new,
and to where all your best stuff is strewn across some
personal floor and where you spend lots of times collecting,
and reflecting, and trying to forget and remember.
And oh, yes, there’s some place for you where past present and never
are all one, and the future beckons
and you weigh or weighed once
the cost of leaving or staying put.

And even if you leave or left,
some day you do or have or will return.
There’s a magnetic weight to that place,
a pulling heft that stays behind
and always reminds you.
And if you never leave home,
well then it becomes new anyway,
when you earn your own way there
make your own home name.

And it’s not a game, it’s not lame to say it’s true,
you don’t need to worry if someone will misconstrue
and think you are just another unfamous face from
some little place where no one else claims residence
or evidence of ever having haunted those old Mom Dad streets.
Don’t beat your heart to some popular rhythm just for show.
You know that place.

Where is your home?

Go back whenever you want.
Or stay.
You know the way.
If only in your mind.
There are so many ways to be at home.
Don’t leave that all behind.

And yes,
it’s okay to think kindly of where you were born,
where your loves always end up lying.
That’s your home, my friend.
That is your home.

Stop trying so hard to deny
open all those old doors and fly inside
and say hello, say hi,
to everyone there
who has lived and died
and glided and strides with you along life’s line.
Anywhere, any time.

Then
sit down a while.
And just be at home.