On We Call Home by Rachel Coleman
By Janice Northerns
Hi, this is Janice Northerns, coming to you from Wichita, Kansas, for Poets on the Plains. I’m going to share a poem today by an amazing writer, Rachel Seth Coleman, who was one of the first people I met when I moved to Kanas 27 years ago. Rachel grew up in southwest Kansas, but her father was born in India and emigrated to the U. S. at the age of 14. Some people may think of Kansas as being populated by mainly white folks, but southwest Kansas, especially, has welcomed immigrants from many parts of the world for years. The poem I’m reading, “We Call Home,” is a ghazal, a poetic form which utilizes a repeated phrase and traditionally includes the name of the poet in the last couplet. I think this form is especially suited to the topic the author explores in this poem, which is the notion of what home is for immigrants.
We Call Home
By Rachel Coleman
No one knows when we left where it was we call home,
so even now I wonder: what should we call home?
We left Kent, Kond, La Martiniére, Calcutta
to find a place that would be what we call home
and sometimes it was. For what is this collection
of time, space, salvation, if not what we call home?
A life scored by schedule and hope, second story
apartment, curry scent above scrubbed floors: We call home
the place we met to eat and talk and worry. Are
bank book, mortgage, phone the sum of what we call home?
The address we list on the license. Location
we learned to write in ink, smudged. The place we call home
because there’s no going back. The destination
we choose from the options offered: that, we call home.
Though what we left still echoes: tiger hunts and tea
served right at four at the table, that is called home
though not for everyone who shows up, caste always
quietly noted though we might not say: Home
belongs to whoever has made it so. We should
know by now that you bring along what you call home
in the bone, no option. In the pocket, if you can.
In the back, unbent, inside, what you call home.
It remains in spite of the melting pot and words sworn
by your father, Rachel, what you know to call home.
Used with Permission.
I love the many different ways this piece makes us think about what home is. The poem starts with an intriguing first line: “No one knows when we left where it was we call home.”If home is the place you are originally from, which is one way we sometimes define it, how can you not know when you left? The writer offers clues by listing Kent, Kond, La Martiniere, and Calcutta, places located in England, Armenia, and India. Home seems to be different places, in other words. How far back do we trace our ancestry to find home? Which of these places was it?
This uncertainty introduced in the first line is threaded through most of the poem, as the writer describes different scenarios that could be home. These descriptions offer us a brief, imagistic portrait of the immigrants in a “second story apartment, curry scent above scrubbed floors …. the place we met to eat and talk and worry.” But just as we are picturing this “home,” the writer calls it into question. Are these physical details of a life, the “bank book, mortgage, [and] phone” all there is to a home?
She then addresses two factors that complicate defining home for immigrants: Of necessity, a location may be “a place we call home [only] because there is no going back,” and the choice of that place is sometimes limited by the options offered.
I also want to talk about the phrase the author chooses to repeat throughout the poem. She doesn’t write about “a place that is home,” but rather “a place we call home.” That’s an important distinction. The use of the word “call” qualifies the descriptions and creates a feeling of ambivalence, underscoring the uncertainty the poem hands to us at the very beginning.
The poet also chooses to use the first person plural pronoun “we” throughout the poem, which makes the question of home a generational quest, one that lingers with the current generation, as the speaker in the poem, who introduces herself in the second line, asks “even now I wonder: what should we call home?”
After exploring this question for most of the poem, there is shift away from uncertainty in the last three couplets. The speaker, who is named as the poet in the last line, finally gets an answer to her question with these lovely lines:
We should
know by now that you bring along what you call home
in the bone, no option. In the pocket, if you can.
In the back, unbent, inside, what you call home.
You can read more about Rachel Seth Coleman’s Anglo-Indian heritage in her essay, “Local Flavor,” in the recently published anthology Kansas Matters. (https://kansaspress.ku.edu/9780700640508/ )
This is Janice Northerns for Poets on the Plains, from the place I call home, Wichita, Kansas.
POETS ON THE PLAINS HOST
Janice Northerns is the author of Some Electric Hum, winner of the Byron Caldwell Smith Book Award from the University of Kansas, the Kansas Authors Club Nelson Poetry Book Award, anda WILLA Literary Award Finalist in Poetry. The author grew up on a farm in Texas and holds degrees from Texas Tech University, where she received the Robert S. Newton Creative Writing Award. Her poetry has been nominated for Pushcart and Best of the Net prizes. After living in southwest Kansas for 25 years, she and her husband moved to Wichita in 2023. She is active in the local chapter of the Kansas Authors Club and presents workshops locally and at the state level. Learn more on her website: www.janicenortherns.com
FEATURED POET
Rachel Seth Coleman, former newspaper writer and a perpetual bibliovore and poet, has lived in Kansas most of her life. She holds a bachelor’s degree in English Literature from Fort Hays State University and will complete an MFA in creative writing from Antioch University Los Angeles in 2026. With her husband, she has lived in Liberal for 30 years. You can read Rachel's work in the anthology Kansas Matters, published by the University of Kansas Press, and on her Substack, "Out of Print.”
