Welcome

Every time it’s the Nature 

that welcomes you the dearest

surrounding the universal being in its overwhelming glory

of the simplest, yet tremendously complex

way of existing in your most comfortable layer.

This is my original self. Which

involves so many abandoned layers of unnecessary habits 

and stuck emotions, but yet, 

here

the ultimate complexity of humanness finds me.

Fills me with dozens of mosquito bites that are 

more comforting than the pain they anticipate.

Getting pampered in the lack of manmade noise.

Feeling the pleasure of the hospitality of the loved ones,

the comfort of being – again – surrounded by the familiar;

the Nature, the inner Warmth, Nature’s beauty and 

the Language.

Home. 

The treacherous longing for the past while living in the present with its unique

challenges.

I might not belong here anymore, but right here my emptiness feels in its place,

and something in me gets fulfilled in a way that, for a moment, I, once more, can let go

of the idea of the past being superior to the present.

Here I can be me, but not only here.

The Future is supposed to be unknown and finally

that pleases me. 

Kata Hyvärinen is a Finnish teacher, linguist, and an avid reader who found bilingual poems coming out of her after living in the U.S. for ten years. She still speaks, talks, and reads mainly in Finnish, so her poems are an interesting outlet for the second language. Her dream is to get a long novel published -- in Finnish of course!