From the Veil to the Sun
‘The trail I’m on is based on running down questions: How does the land/nature speak through the conduit of the poet/artist who is listening? and how do we make it home?’ Writer in Residence Alun Hughes reflects on the relationship with his homeland.
In this my last post as a Dialect writer in residence and to accompany my last poem, I’d like to share some of the background from which it made its way. I started my last residency at the beginning of November, the day after the festival of Samhain on October 31st. This festival celebrates the time of year when the veil is at its thinnest between the living and the dead, between one world and another.
The circus of COP26 in Glasgow was filling the media who, at least on mainstream channels, filled the airwaves with the familiar - at first, hope of success and then, the disappointment of failure. They played the chorus of despair with great aplomb. I begin to hear the despair and pointlessness quoted repeatedly in my local pub as headlines were regurgitated as assured opinion and outrage, defeated resignation and the currently ever-present existential angst. I’m sure that there were some highly positive outcomes of COP26, probably achieved at the subsequent talks that were held in the wake of ‘leaders’ jetting in and out.
I was thinking about the veil of Samhain, the liminal space between worlds and wondering again, as I suspect many of us do, how we get from this world as we are experiencing it, particularly in the light of the climate crisis, to the world we are imagining, that we envision and sense, if only in the pressing immanence of it.
It is this journey, from here to there, and the ‘how’ of it, that has captivated me for many years. I got involved in ecotherapeutic work, sometimes called Wilderness work, in 2008. Since being in some way part of the ‘eco’ movement since 1995, I had travelled from road protests to working and teaching on real time solutions in both urban and rural, land-based projects. I had reached the recognition that our way there is not necessarily based on what we know, or think we know about our home, although that helps technically; but rather how we feel about it that generates the designs for being here and living in peace with our non-human neighbours.
Gary Snyder is a writer I have returned to again lately. Talking about the Americas in his Pulitzer Prize winning collection, Turtle Island, his hope was that while the immigrant population of the last few centuries was made up of people from all over the world, they could begin to take deep care of their home by attaining an indigenous feeling for the environment. This perspective has stayed with me for many years, it got into my bones and has informed a large part of my thinking and the choices I’ve made. Having witnessed so many people, not least myself, re-connecting in nature through wilderness work to a deeper ecological sense of themselves, I have become convinced that the veil between the worlds, between here and there, dis- and reconnection is incredibly thin and constantly available. I am reminded here of a line from another poem I made called Techno Pets, ‘that the trees were waiting for us to catch up’.
I have returned recently to Gary Snyder’s first collection, Myths and Texts, during a deep dive into the extraordinary work of the Canadian writer Robert Bringhurst. I find myself swimming into Haida myth-tellers and poets, the work of linguists who transcribed and translated them in the last century and Bringhurst’s epic effort to bring them and their accompanying understanding to a contemporary readership. Margaret Attwood described his achievement as ‘gigantic, as well as heroic.’
The trail I’m on is based on running down questions: How does the land/nature speak through the conduit of the poet/artist who is listening? and how do we make it home?
My last residency poem is titled ‘Hiraeth,’ a word that means deep longing for something, especially one's home, particularly in Welsh culture. I hope that this poem is one more faltering step on this path my work is taking. It found the light of day by the Winter Solstice, the end and the beginning of our travels with the light, another threshold, another fire centring the circle of our knowing.
I am incredibly grateful to Juliette Morton for not only setting up the Dialect platform but also for her excellent support and critical input throughout my residency. I look forward to being involved with Dialect for many moons to come.
Thanks also to you dear reader, your comments and feedback have been a great support to my confidence as an emerging writer. I’ll sign off here, wishing you all peace and positivity for the coming year, with a poem from Gary Snyder. Go well.
For the Children
The rising hills, the slopes,
of statistics
lie before us.
the steep climb
of everything, going up,
up, as we all
go down.
In the next century
or the one beyond that,
they say,
are valleys, pastures,
we can meet there in peace
if we make it.
To climb these coming crests
one word to you, to
you and your children:
stay together
learn the flowers
go light
Gary Snyder Turtle Island (1974)
ALUN HUGHES
Hiraeth
It is Autumn at Crater Lake, air dampening,
the clock unwinding between Samhain and Solstice.
Swim pilgrims disrobe and make their slow step homage
into your cold simple, delivering themselves.
I am leaving along the leaf mush track, to wind
round you this last time. Beginning, a tall shoreline
sycamore with fresh fallen leaves spreads a yellow
rattle blanket wrapping around its bankside
and holds onto summer’s gold, that last sun kiss
in this west-nor-westerly increasing,
flittering through the wind ears in my head.
A hawthorn leans in close, wrapped in its ivy jacket,
mesmerising the water and Spring’s broken willow snap mast,
whose submarine branches have morphed to roots,
sprays Summer’s fresh stems to greet the waves,
the klook-klook kayak bow wash waves or, on a paddleboard,
slap clattering as wavelet percussion, dak-dak—Doke,
dak-dak—Doke, the paddler with a backpack
is staring at me standing here and paddles on, to
where everyone is long gone, to the quieter water
of the next crater along, the coots having heard
him coming – dak-Dak, dak-Dak, dak-Dak –
Back at my feet, the shore itself makes its presence felt,
flexing into the watery edge of my sight,
adjusting its hold like sleeping lovers stirring
and at the shug bench, a low dome of briar thatch,
forty feet wide and six high, rolls itself up
to the water, holds to the last of the land
and altars for a black maul willow wedding
above. Two stems, grown too close in the wave edge,
open to each other’s bark rub wounds and creak
their vows into the wind in swan speak.
I find myself, suddenly here, remembering
on Alba, on Kernow and Cymru.
That old familiar hiraeth hits me again
and I wonder if home might be just here,
this time, in the next unlikely hundred yards
of this anthropocene crater’s rim.
Where the Elder mothers crowd,
Ruis Elder Ysgawen
Groved together, lit by Venus, to whom
the last nettles stretch, tall and ghost thin pale
Reaching for the cauldron’s rim that brims
birth and birth again. Queen of Herbs,
holding origin, taking me on.
Or with this whip of Neptune’s willow
Willow Helygen Saille
I take to touch the water’s veil, for know-how,
to divine holding as helygen’s roots and branches
are woven walls making river veins, or keeping this
lake in place, or the bounds of my journey to seeing
a home I could live with or one more I’ll make on the way.
With my Ash spine leant to the trunk.
Ash Onnen Uinnseann
Yggdrasil, as arrow, tool shaft and staff,
aligns me to the task I make, balanced here,
between solar vision and lunar sight.
I braid my even weave of spectral tethers,
to the world tree as a maypole, in ribbons
of colour and light and sing my harmony
to this certain peace I have found
with my back against the tree.
Spellbound to the hawthorns
Hawthorn Sgitheach Draenen Wen
who’ll be there all along, memorising the way,
the songlines I see, following migration trails
toward the edge of ice or later, drovers’ tracks.
I chew the leaves for food, for heart’s protection
and wait to weave mayflower garlands, to marry
all others and, after the feast, with a sprig kept
against the storms, step through the veil, across
the stone and begin the longing’s far walk home.
Glossary
Hiraeth - A deep longing for something, especially one's home, particularly in Welsh culture.
Ruis - Gaelic for Elder tree.
Ysgawen - Welsh for Elder tree.
Saille - Gaelic for Willow.
Helygen - Welsh for Willow.
Uinnseann - Gaelic for Ash (pronounced ooshin).
Onnen - Welsh for Ash.
Sgitheach - Gaelic for Hawthorn.
Draenen Wen - Welsh for Hawthorn.
Alun Hughes is Dialect’s writer in residence throughout the months of March, July and November 2021. You can follow him on Twitter @alunowl
