Homecoming
Homecoming Podcast
Spring in Tennessee
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Spring in Tennessee

Nashville, Tennessee
2

All the neighborhood is bursting
Bubbling up like deep deep dancing
That Spring is here
Those bushes lining my driveway
Once brown, now soft and thick with leaves and
White with flowers that smell like jasmine

Robins, red bellies, hopping
Music loud out kitchen windows
Families on the front porch
BBQ for dinner and
Songbirds from the South
Celebrating that life has returned

As the sun stays longer and
Friends talk at street corners longer,
Flowers purple and rabbits graze and
Sky blues and
Kids return to blankets on grass
It’s all bursting out

And I am too

Six months indoors
Resting and
Patiently watching out windows
The soft, powdery white
Dreaming of hands in dirt and
Biking at dusk

Resting and rebuilding like
The bear in her den before she
Emerges with her cubs to
Feast on what always returns
We wait in knowing
Spring always returns

Skin hot and sticky and
Windows open when I awake in bed from sleeping
Spring has arrived in Tennessee

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Homecoming
Homecoming Podcast
Homecoming is a newsletter of short essays and poems, exploring the meaning of home through a journey across America. Homecoming is a cry for a world in the midst of a meaning crisis. In a time when identity is being fought for by advertisers and campaigners; when we’ve traded in family and place-based community and the tech that’s supposed to connect us only makes us more disconnected; when God has been discarded and what’s put in place simply cannot hold, it can be hard to know what's real and true. What does it really mean to be home? And what does it take to find it? These essays may not read in chronological order. Some names, dates & places have been changed from the otherwise non-fictional stories.
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Emily Clibourn