Home (2004-2024)

 Last week I attended a workshop with the poet Olivia Douglass for a project she is leading called 'Home Soil'. One of the exercises she led during the workshop empowered us to think about the concept of Home and to write a journey poem taking in our own home(s), starting from one and leading to another. This poem is the result of that encouragement, and another's.

Home (2004-2024)

Union Street: a terrace-tiny-rabbit hutch we called Home;

Wedded at the front door,

Separated by the back door,

And a family in-between.

Cash-starved happiness, mortgage payments and dreams.

I had a marriage then,

A job of work,

A place to rest my head,

But was it 'real life'?

They say home is where the heart is -

That concept changed, when you left.

Single-working-mother to 4 and 5 year old girls,

School time, no time, to be myself.

I saved and I grew,

Just like my two, 

But in other ways.

Thank the Lord for depression

And children who need their Mothers 

To set them a good example.

Five years passed and work found me wanting,

A colleague, a cuppa, and an apple for your Eve.

I was lifted from my own obscurity,

Embraced for my weird

And challenged for my norm.

You saw me for my inner conscious,

My desires, my needs,

And over time you moved me,

To the point at which I called YOU 'Home'.

Another five years have passed,

My children, now teenagers, sit in their apartment 

At the top of their home of three years;

The hutch has come and gone.

The white rabbits left us a merry maze of holes 

For us to step between, 

For us to replant our dreams.

And Poets have found fresh grazing 

For me to feed my appetite for words upon.

My Home now has a second home, 'Shamba',

A man-cave of sorts, with a comfortable chair.

And facing forwards, onwards, 

From my two-seater sofa,

I gaze up at the hole in my sky right now,

Hoping to see your face there once more,

Reaching out to be tended, held, loved,

Like the Willow Man at our door.

A Wensley

1.09.2024