Jeff McCallum

When I dream of a home,

it is a house I see,

not a land.

I make assumptions:

there will be no bombs falling in the neighbourhood,

there will be a neighbourhood.

I will be allowed its quiet enjoyment.

I assume it will not be

a cardboard box and yesterday’s newspapers,

or tin walls and a brown, rusting roof,

salvaged from somewhere,

bars on the windows in place of glass.

It will have a bathroom,

more than one.

I do not have this dream because I am living

in a camp for displaced persons

or a FEMA trailer.

I do not have this dream because someone took my house

in a new kind of ethnic cleansing,

whitewashing the eviction with political rhetoric.

I do not have this dream because there are five or twelve or twenty

in a single room with an earthen floor,

or I long to escape the tyranny of my foster home.

I have this dream because I can.

I have this dream because it is as it should be,

here, in America.

If I have this dream,

the time to dream,

the gall to dream,

by what name do I call those who dream for all the reasons I do not?

Assume neither breakfast nor breakfast room.

Dwellers of the realm of the nightmare,

realists, the poor, the victims of war,

brother?

I have this dream because I do not take each day for the gift it is.

They have this dream because some days are not gifts.