On reading On Gallows Down by Nicola Chester (pub 2021) – a memoir of place, protest and belonging – this poem came to me, taking her words and trying to apply them to my place, protest and belonging. I was very struck by how little of my life found echo in them although they had accompanied me too.
With no fidelity to my natal site,
I was not honed, hefted, hearthed, nor imprinted.
So no belonging, no familiar landscape,
(Its intimacies, its particularities)
No pastoral idyll, no signature smells,
Just grief, loss, meaning and memory.
No contours, no triangulation,
No northings and eastings for orientation,
No single place, no anchor, no rootedness,
No place to know and no place to know me,
No home to return to, so no exile either,
No going to earth, freedom disenfranchised.
No connections, re-connections, touchstones,
No conversations that are soft transactions,
Nothing to slow the pace nor speed it up,
No earnestness to explain, explore, celebrate,
To mark, galvanise or commiserate,
No messages. Yet community of sorts.
What was my ‘outdoors’? A longing, a grieving,
A yearning maybe but no nostalgia,
No earthbound premonitions, no ghosts,
No wild familiars, no custom, no nature,
The world become neither intimate nor
Infinite. No hiraeth[1], no cynefin[2].
NOTE TO READER: Emphasise the bold. I’m striving here for an anapestic tetrameter [dadadaa, dadadaa, etc], but some iambs and trochees x4 are mixed in, so it doesn’t quite scan. Grrr!)
[1] Welsh (Brythonic), meaning: “Longing for home to which you cannot return, a home which maybe never was, the nostalgia, the yearning, the grief for the lost places of your past.” Literally homesickness. Pronounce HIGH-raith
[2] Welsh (Brythonic), meaning: “Your place of multiple belongings (cultural, religious, geographic, tribal etc).” Literally habitat or place. Pronounce ke-NEVin