Well, I'm back in France where my house is, where I currently live, where I love and am loved, so this is home. But Wales is home too, at least the concrete aspects of it: the pebble-dash house where I was born, the sea, my dad's vegetable garden, my mam's walnut wardrobes and dressing table that she's had since she was married in 1952. My family. The way people in South Wales use the word 'bad' for 'ill', as in 'she's been bad since last week'. It is so nurturing to feel connected to people and place.
But it is possible to lose our sense of connection even if the people and places in our lives remain unchanged. Perhaps we change. The way we feel. The way we think. Perhaps our view of our world becomes warped. Sometimes that sense of disconnection is temporary. Other times it represents the need for a fundamental change in our life.
Can you write about not being 'at home', either in a literal or metaphorical sense?
Here's a poem I wrote a few years ago.
Where Home Is
A woman stands at the side of the road
staring up at the night sky. Questions
about desire have made her stop her car:
how it’s born, how to tend it, how it dies.
She has read of people killing for it.
She knows a woman who almost disappeared
under its weight. Places return to her –
Belleville, Sweetwater: beauty, something
to quench the heat of her tongue.
It is June, the nights are warm.
One star shines too close to the moon.
She is still so far away from home.
Runner-up,Yorkshire Open Poetry Competition 2006
Published in Equinox July 2007
Thank you for waiting for my return.
Write well.
L x
