A Poem Tangentially Inspired by the Odyssey (by me)

A critical analysis of why my Black ass likes the song “Home”

I. The Lyrics

Alabama, Arkansas I do love my ma and pa

A quaint way to refer to one’s parents-

intimate, filial.

it reminds me of an episode of Superman where he

went home for Christmas, and, with his good American

wholesomeness, hugged his “ma and pa.”

Calling my mother, “ma,” was always tainted by the 

roughness of the urban, but the nostalgia,

the yearn for the simplicity of a different type of

this country, is enough to overcome the nihilism of reality.

Home, let me come home

Home is wherever I’m with you

To think Love is this version of unabashed and

total joy, to be allowed to give in to the thought

is joy enough.

the song is by itself, enough.

perhaps,

I am enough.

II. The Music

The instrumentals and a-track quality of 

the spoken interludes

Sound like something 

out of the late 60s, early 70s-

More nostalgia for the days of yore

begging you to whistle while you work.

Though I was not yet a thought or a possibility 

When the world was filled with tinted 

shades, bell bottoms, and Afros,

The song makes me feel like the 

tragic star of a country music or

Rock and Roll duo that succumbed to the

pressures of drugs and domestic violence 

that makes their life fodder for 

the Oscar run of a 2010s/2020s biopic,

all with the yellow tinted haze 

filter over their sweatless struggles.

III. The Singing

The woman singer, I learned, is named Jade Castrinos, 

and her full-bodied, emotive voice steals the show 

with its ability to use up all the air in her lungs to sing 

the simplistic lyrics of a band with a cooler name than they deserve. 

Even as I learned she was pushed out, or quit, or whatever it was,

from the Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros band, 

whose name I will never care to remember in full, her voice

is the breath of air that permeates the song,

the wishful joy of the song,

the sweet little love story of a small town man and woman,

She brings to life the nostalgia of the time, of the moment,

not in that we are all yearning for it to be the 60s or 70s again,

when your grandparents were protesting a war instead of

being the reason the Earth might explode from greenhouse gases. 

Her voice, instead, guides us along our Odyssey back to Ithaca

To be held and bathed by our patient wife.

In essence, her nostalgia does not feel as much

like the corporate call to recollection, but the necessity of nostos-

The homecoming meaning nostalgia lost.