The Maker The Charles Causley Literary Blog
Home, by Mahek Ansari
Mahek won third place in the 16-18 years category in our 2022 Young People’s Poetry Competition.
I’ve never felt at home
I’m proud of where i’m from, i am
But it wasn’t always like this
I used to hide in the summer
Stay in, lather myself in sunscreen
Praying i wouldn’t go a shade darker
Id go back ‘home’ and see the adverts
‘Fair and lovely’ on every billboard
Looked down on in my own ‘home’
For what i wear, How i talk, How ‘white’ i now am
I’d come back here and turn on the tv
Seeing myself in the indian characters
Nerdy, awkward, ugly, unwanted
I knew it wasn’t true but i believed
So i didn’t take out my pack lunch
I forgot my mother tongue
I tried to act dumb
I laughed at all the jokes
All these people raved about loving my cultures food
Yet when i ate it, I was disgusting
Diwali, every year my best friends at mine
We’d light the fireworks and laugh
Until last year. I don’t even know who she was
The fireworks were too loud wherever she lived
Somehow that was my fault
She called my people dirty, uncivilised
And just like that, tears
Crying on my doorstep at midnight
Just when i thought i loved myself
A stranger broke it down
But im building it back up
I wait until summer to get a tan
Even online i love to see people like me
A shared experience no matter how different we may be
Again i turn on the tv and see characters like me
This time smart, beautiful, friendly, loved
I’m trying to learn my mother tongue again
I talk about my birth place
How beautiful, how rich with culture, how much i long to go back
A piece of me remains in India