No Place Like ‘Home’
Dorothy clicked her shoes: Once, twice, thrice,
wishing to return home.
A thousand ages descended upon her,
returning her to dusty Kansas.
Where was her sepia dream-land?
She was greeted by an indifferent city.
Foreign faces with copper brown tans
chatter in twisted tongues.
The moon appears, the orchestra begins.
Ten hundred thousand insects,
rub their wings together,
for an endless night of noise.
Dorothy stood lost in the land she knew so well.
How long had she been gone? Oz made Kansas seem lost,
dustbowl desert, yielding loneliness.
The Witch of the North,
sprawled across Hooters billboards.
Where was her lion-hearted friend,
her man in tin armour to save her from this world?
Ruby red slippers now myth,
replaced with thrift-shop jelly shoes.
Somewhere over the rainbow lies lost 1939.
This state had long been left to the story books.
To be born here is to die here,
isolation is the real killer.
Not a friend in all three million,
as stray as cats and dogs that roam the street.
The scarecrow hung in the cornfield
is not your friend.
You can turn to Wendy, Papa John, Ronald McDonald.
They’ll see you don’t lose your way.
Drown your sorrows in Blue Ribbon,
that once held up your hair so beautifully.
Send Munchkins through metal detectors,
and hope they get something out of today,
because today is the same as tomorrow.
This isn’t Kansas Dorothy,
not as you know it.
Now try and look for yesterday in tomorrow.
Amber Donovan-Stevens is Poet Laureate at her school, currently studying English, History and Art at A Level. Her Poem ‘ No Place Like Home’ won Gold at the Canterbury Festival Schools’ Competition and was published with other poems in the online broadsheet “Agenda”.