· 2 min read
The Journey Home
On travel, culture, and the strange comfort of your own bed — a poem about how even the trip home tells its own story.
There’s a particular kind of alertness that comes with being somewhere unfamiliar — every cobblestone announcing itself, every hillside looking louder than it would back home. Travel does that. It turns the volume up on the world.
This one moves through both halves of a trip: the wonder of being somewhere else, and the long, unglamorous slog of getting back. I don’t think either half tells the whole truth on its own.
Palacios, jungles, and mazes
Cobblestone, riches, and ancient hills
Even the winds tell a story
Cities so alive they erupt in thrill
Filled with history, a sense of pride
For a moment, you can see why
To be part of a culture, if only for a day
The greatest enrichment to your story
And then airports, buses, and planes
A taxi, endless luggage, and long drives
The journey home too tells a tale
A deep breath when you open the door
Home—where your life is
The simple pleasure of your bed
And for better or for worse
There’s a big world out there
The first two stanzas move the way travel actually feels in the moment — fast, layered, almost too much to take in at once. “The greatest enrichment to your story” is doing the real work here: it names travel as something borrowed, not owned. A day inside someone else’s culture doesn’t make it yours, but it changes you anyway.
Then the poem does something most travel writing skips — it stays with the getting home. Airports and taxis and luggage aren’t a detour from the story, they’re part of it. And the ending isn’t triumphant so much as honest: home is smaller than the world you just left, and that’s fine. There’s comfort in the smallness. The big world will still be there.
— JTC