Haiku About Home

The most memorable poem here is about a hand. Elliot Greiner titles the poem Home, and then says, YOU REST YOUR HAND ON MINE, warm like a flame, and the speaker cannot move. The house does not appear. Home is a person, and the poem proves it by the title and nothing else. It also explains why the other poems here look for home in objects: a clock, a battery, a fruit from somewhere else.

Houses and what is missing

Chris Gusek walks through a QUIET HOUSE and counts the dead batteries and the dead clock on the mantle, the sound of a place without anyone to wind it. Misty Burke stands on ASPHALT watching a ZIG-ZAGGING ANT and ends with MISSING HOME, a homesick poem that turns on the smallest traveler. Dennis Lowe slices a SOFT, RIPE AVOCADO, THE LAST ONE FROM HOME. Erin Castaldi marks the opposite occasion: on the eve of a first home purchase, there is A SHOOTING STAR.

A last line that rereads the first

John Reinhart plays a trick with the final line. BLAZING SUNLIGHT and a morning like no other read as a happy start, and then comes HOME IN FLAMES, and the sunlight has to be read again. Erin Castaldi’s other poem fills a new house, with a FIRST DAY HOME and hefty blossoms that fill CHILLY VOIDS.

Questions readers ask

Is a home poem the same as a family poem?

Home can be a place, a smell or a clock. A family poem needs people, and a home poem needs only the signs that people are expected.

Can a house be the whole subject?

It can, as in Gusek’s poem, which has nobody in it. The batteries and the clock tell you about the people.

More themes to read

FamilyMemoryLonelinessCity LifeTravel and the RoadAll themes

Last reviewed November 2026. Poems are the work of the poets credited and link to their pages in the original issues.