It’s been five years since I’ve spent every waking moment @ home
A sunrise to a sunset
Instead, my eye lids open up to a concrete jungle 
instead of the avocado tree outside my window
My ears, to the honking of horns and not the crowing of a cock on the guava tree
My nose to coffee brewing in a pot instead of the ripe smell of the air, 
with a mixture of that early morning dew
For in those five years, a 7 letter word stands out FREEDOM
With all that goes on in our world, 
memories and thoughts of home becomes my freedom
If I asked everyone I knew to define liberty
I’m almost guaranteed a philosophical definition
The irony is that in defining it we confine it to conform
To something it cannot be, because it simply just is
Beyond our imagination
My freedom 
Exists in 
The red white and black of a twin island republic
The idea of “it takes a community to raise a child”
It’s in the faces of my African, Indian, Spanish, Chinese and Syrian brothers and sisters
With their distinct accents, features, and flare for life
It’s in the sound of sweet soca and kaiso on the kitchen radio
And steel pan in pan yards to which masqueraders begin to move too
On jouvert morning or carnival Monday and Tuesday
It’s the smell of bake n’ shark at Maracas Bay
Or the taste of wild meat curried with some potato and buss up shot on the side
It’s that freedom I see in a humming bird, or hibiscus
On the slopes of the Northern Range or in my neighbour’s back yard
Or in the quick and heavy showers followed by light tantalizing drizzles
It’s what I feel as those wheels touch Piarco
The freedom I experience here, is upon the reflection of my home and culture
It’s the reflection of our culture as West Indians
For me
Home and Freedom go hand in hand
Because freedom is where your heart is
And my heart has always found a resting place in Trinidad and Tobago