Hello all,
Today I woke up to my 100th subscriber, and I just wanted to write a short note saying thank you to everyone! I’ve enjoyed making this substack, and I hope you all have enjoyed the poems! Now for a new poem!
Moving Home or, Hiraeth
Home never fades from the image of home –
crystalline and enshrined in catacombs –
one knows the kitchen with egg-shell tile,
the bedroom with two twins and a
stitched rug of red and blue and yellow.
May these things never decay
as I sit in a house 1000 miles from home.
People inhabit homes, engaging the air and space,
crowding out the mind’s attic
scattering delicate dust preservatives.
I find them on the porch in rocking chairs
that used to be blue and who knows what before,
and they smile and it looks wrong:
a house drifting through the blue sky.
This house, site of my childhood and adolescence,
becomes transformed in four years time
to a place, just as ripe, yet I am the grafted.
I am the returner to an old dream;
a youth extracting this house from history.
Now, to start again, from scratch,
wrapped in heavy Hiraeth, I push off the blue dock.
Good on ya! Are you Welsh? I just learned the word hiraeth, from your poem. Killer first line, by the way, Home never fades from the image of home.
congratulations Samuel