The South still calls at me like a warm wind,
whispering magnolias and sunlit rivers,
songs of crickets under humid moons,
where the air clings close, heavy with memory.
I miss the moss-laden oaks,
the stretch of peach-scented highways,
the drawl of voices that once welcomed
and wrapped me in their cadence.
But love turns to ash in a fire of laws,
where hatred marches bold-faced in daylight,
and my existence is a battle cry
for those who see me as an affront to the Lord.
The streets hum with sermons turned sharp,
each word another wound, another reason
I cannot walk unbroken.
Georgia holds my laughter in its fields,
yet its hands are calloused with cruelty,
its smiles split with sharp edges
that carve away the safety of my name.
So I linger here, far from home,
I am back home, yet somehow in exile,
because the South, for all its open wounds,
sometimes felt like my truest home.
Its red clay and cicada songs cradled me,
even as its laws and pulpits turned to storms,
raging against people like me.
I carry the South like a ghost in my chest,
haunted by what it was,
what it could never be again.