brick ring

It's about 10x10
Feet that is, the square, and
The soil is good and rumpled.
I hope to add rocks, bury some of them.

Bury some rocks, yes, that's what I'll do.

I'm planting burdock
Planting burdock and burying rocks
(Because burdock loves an anchor)
In the the brick ring in the square.


You can believe in rocks; have faith in them
I mean, they will remain rocks.
Right?
I mean, you can smash a rock up
You can grind a rock down but all you get is littler rocks.
Still rocks.

And that's another thing rocks are good at right there.
Remaining still.

You know what you can't believe in? Words.
They're sloppy things
They slosh around
In a state of surface tension oversensitivity
That so belies their weight it's hard
Enough to wrap one's head around them
Let alone anchor one's roots.

I AM MY HOUSE

I had a dream, or something, that woke me up last night.

I was hovering above a small family. They were walking home. They had bundles of bedding with them as though they'd been forced out but now they were coming home. I watched them round the corner to their street and it was gone. Bombed. I saw the man and boys stop in their tracks, just looking, and I heard her, the mother, begin to keen and wail and I felt a wrenching in my gut.

They say that when women give birth, there comes a moment when we feel connected to all other women who ever have, or ever will, go through that experience. I felt her pain in the same way, the universal depth to which we feel ourselves and our homes to be one. I knew that she felt - that I would feel - that to lose one's home is to be destroyed.

We can analyse that, say whether it is right or wrong, whether a woman is or should be more than what she does for her family but let's not. Let's just acknowledge what is.

I wrote the piece below because of that dream. Or whatever it was.