I Cannot Leave My Country Poem by Gert Strydom

I cannot leave my country
as it is in my blood;
this earth is part of me
and when it rains
it’s as if I smell new life.

I do not want to see any other horizon
when the sun that almost every day
burns hot here,
hanging in a cobalt blue sky
makes that I already yearn for my own country.

What can you find in the culture
of other people, where you do not really fit in,
when your own humanity binds you so
that you know that you would be foreign
and goalless there,
like a stranger that is longing
to go back home?