Home
As if we would never arrive,
we check our watches and connections.
So many elsewheres as we
walk into abandoned rooms
that somehow have forgotten us.
A window propped, half-open
on a garden, stares. A bird
as if to say, you’re here,
glances its wings against the blue
so far away, then becomes invisible.
How they call to us, the lost places.
Now I carry my life, as a snail might,
slipping across grass and stone:
the shrugged contours of her shell’s light spiral,
the glistening of her bridal train.
Like a half-remembered song,
marking us, making us,
words call us back, they call us on.
To know the world in another language
is to never know the world the same.
As if we would never arrive,
we check our watches and connections.
So many elsewheres as we
walk into abandoned rooms
that somehow have forgotten us.
A window propped, half-open
on a garden, stares. A bird
as if to say, you’re here,
glances its wings against the blue
so far away, then becomes invisible.
How they call to us, the lost places.
Now I carry my life, as a snail might,
slipping across grass and stone:
the shrugged contours of her shell’s light spiral,
the glistening of her bridal train.
Like a half-remembered song,
marking us, making us,
words call us back, they call us on.
To know the world in another language
is to never know the world the same.
'Gently edging towards an elsewhere that may or may not exist outside of her own imagination, Deryn Rees-Jones’ wonderful poem of mental journeying cleaves towards the light of ‘lost places’. Yielding only to evanescent contemplation, such terrain are figments as fleeting yet totemic as a bird silhouetted against the sky and soon lost to the sun, giving evidence that the province of the mind is as powerful a projective tool as an apprehender of geographical reality.'
Read more at yorkshiretimes.co.uk
‘Home’ is taken from Home on the Move: Two Poems Go on a Journey and is available from our online shop and all good bookshops now.
