Homeless or Homeful

Before I was ten I lived in eleven dwellings
and eleven more before I was thirty and three.
Twenty-two homes to live in and leave
in thirty years, and you ask me where I come from!

I hear of homeless immigrants and know that I know.

We rented lonely dark places, stayed with relations,
were ‘paying guests’ with friends or strangers
and this was in war-years, the rationing,
the making-do and managing,
waiting still and hoping times,
not quite sure and maybe if and 
thankful for small mercies times 
when ‘home’ was where we were just now,
where my mother was and where she made
what beauty that she could as best she could
and never thought it not worthwhile.

A garden or a picture, books, colour,
the book of nature too and always
getting rid of clutter, all we couldn’t carry 
and a clearing-out and placing-in of us:
our stories, self-respect, the friends
we had to leave, the memories that nobody
could share with us, our dreams, dream-houses
and our need to hold together to exist.

I’ve said goodbye to homes where I have worked
to make them clean and habitable.
Perhaps I was a slave to them, never ceasing
in the daily task of damming dereliction.
There is some freedom in forsaking them,
in letting run unravelled the woven toil
of years, made up of minutes, that was
tight, so coiled around me.

I alone now know about those places
which I laboured to sustain and then destroyed
by simply ceasing, moving on. What marks
of me remain will be anonymous.

Don’t ask us where we come from; where we go 
is more important. Yet we leave a trail,  
a string of beauty, broken, that we made, 
homeless yet homeful, scattered now.

 

Homeless or Homeful has been published in Tessa's recent book Not Just Moonshine, new and selected poems, from Luath Press and also in the Stanza anthology, Skein of Geese.

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