I’ve been talking poetry a bit more than usual lately (at least since the sad demise of the Tuesday Poem community), mainly sparked by the Boosted campaign for the Canterbury Poets, so in that spirit, it feels like time for a poem.

Homing is from the Ithaca Conversations series and (for those who don’t know the story) centers on Odysseus’s (aka Ulysses) return to his home island of Ithaca after twenty years’ away: ten years fighting in the Trojan War (The Illiad) and ten years of storms, shipwreck, and sorcery (The Odyssey), attempting to return home.

Homing

He hears it, in every slap

of wave against wood,

as the ship cleaves water

like a seabird, hears the word

that he has hungered for

through the lost years,

whispered to him now

by the sea as it bears him up,

speeds him on like a lover

to the consummation

of his long-held dream

of home:  home, lilts the sea,

soft as a lullaby, and home,

sings the wind, slipping

through rigging, soothing

him to rest, not to wake

even as a clear dawn

pares away night, reveals

rocky shores and a green crag

rising, not even to stir

when the sailors lift him

over the bulwark and down,

splashing through shallows

to leave him on shadowed sand,

tender as a child smiling

in his sleep, and dreaming,

dreaming still

of the long returning.

(c) Helen Lowe

Published in JAAM 26 2008

As I observed in relation to another Ithaca Conversations poem, Argos, the sequence reflects my long held love of myth and legend. The Iliad and The Odyssey were among my earliest favourites, and the power they exerted over my imagination is best evidenced by the way they continue to infiltrate my poetry and short fiction. The novels I write are also centered around epic, legend and myth, both in what is loosely our world (Thornspell) and alternate worlds (The Wall of Night Series.)