Querencia: where one feels safe, a place where one feels at home.

Posted on by Live & Learn

rest-read-saturday-home-safe

As for the querencia,
we all have a place where we feel safest,
even if it is only the idea of a place,
maybe an idea by itself,
the place that all our being radiates out from,
like an idea of friendship or justice
or perhaps something simpler
like the memory of a back porch
where we laughed a low
and how the setting sun
through the pine trees shone on the green chairs,
flickered off the ice cubes in our glasses.

~ Stephen Dobyns, from “Querencia,” Velocities: New and Selected Poems, 1966-1992

Notes:

16 thoughts on “Querencia: where one feels safe, a place where one feels at home.”

  1. Lovely poem 🙂 Just interested to know what your interpretation of “where we laughed a low”. I’m thinking it means that we laughed our way through depression, but am not sure. Do you agree, David? (Just being analytical, as I like to get the full meaning of things, if possible (and, yes, I did drive some of my teachers up the wall at school!).

  2. I’ve had a lot of these places in my life. Sometimes a quiet wooded path, sometimes in the middle of a frantic city, strangely enough. But always, when I think of family, it is somewhere around a kitchen. ❤️

  6. When me and my siblings were children we had a home where the arms of our Mother provided a warmth…now she is gone & we can’t feel those arms, see her face or hear her voice…so raw, 12 and a half hours it’s been…..our hearts break….I love the warm. peaceful painting…

  7. Stephen Dobyns is a very good and very under-appreciated writer. I knew him when he lived and taught in Syracuse. He’s incredibly versatile — poetry, literary novels, dark humor pieces and mysteries. I recommend “The Two Deaths of Señora Puccini,” “Cold Dog Soup” and any of his Saratoga mysteries. I don’t recall the titles, but one of them begins with a scene in a dentist’s office that is very funny.

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