Like the previous one, several of my poems have drawn inspiration and ideas from the ‘My North’ biographical notes that accompany each poem, as well as the poem itself.
My 3.2 reverts to the short form of my first few responses, written before I was posting them separately, and before this had become my main creative endeavour, for the time being. Of its four lines, almost all of the first two are lifted directly from Cora Greenhill’s ‘My North’, and its title (it is the only piece I have given a title) is a simple transposition of Cora’s Moving North:
Yet, despite its highly derivative nature and its brevity, this is one of the pieces that I am most satisfied with. I like its sound in my mouth (I finished the sequence I read at Spoken Word Saturday the other week with this). Cora’s poem articulates beautifully the sense of ‘dawning trust’, of ‘thaw’ after a turbulent emotional winter, and a sense of ‘home’ not doing what it should. I haven’t had quite the same experience, thankfully, but we have had the feeling of going back to the place where we lived with a sense that really we were leaving, not returning, home.
Moving West
Our slow learning: that a place can hold you
down. That love can last as long as the string
that carries stretch and slack from hand to kite.
That snow hides from the sea. That here is home.
(But now we are here, and here, I hope, to stay…
(inertiapreneur 