Jigsaw Poem by Winsy Tink

[This was written a week after I returned home after spending the past five years in UK. I was already missing London, where I had done university, and home was not really home in the sense of fitting in and feeling comfortable, because it had changed so much I didn't know this place called 'home' anymore.]

You ask me
Why my face has become so –
Blank –
Where I’ve hidden my sharp-humoured questions
And in their place installed
Suspicious muteness
You complain
That my glassy gaze renders surmise –
Futile –
The familiar song and dance and laughter
Betrayed by one flitting
Hesitated smile

I think
I left pieces behind in London
I believe
One was dropped in the strawberry fields in Norfolk
Another must have been caught among branches while climbing trees in Hyde Park
A third might still be clinging to the train on Platform Ten –
I’m not sure –
I had no time to gather all the pieces
Nor the baggage allowance to bring them home
And I thought I’d leave a little something
So London would miss me

You wonder
How I am changed (but so are you!)
You see, there are pieces of me missing
Until you find them then
I am a jigsaw wrongly fitted
Disoriented
Scattered
Incomplete