written and posted by members of Lancashire Dead Good Poets' Society

Friday 11 April 2014

Home is where you lay your hat? .... Nah!

What's in an address? Many may say it's your home, but I don't feel that way.

In my 38 years of being on this planet, so far I have had 8 addresses. The first 3 of those were the family home shared with my Parents and siblings. They really were home to me. The remainder were houses or flats shared with housemates, the significant other in my life at the time, or latterly, with just my son. None of those later 5 I would class as home, just a place that I have resided. To me, a home is yours, mortgaged or not. I have only ever rented as an adult, and short of winning the lottery to enable me to buy, it is highly unlikely that I will ever get on the property ladder myself.

I try my best to make our current place of residence feel like home for my son. I like living there. It is a cosy little 2 bedroom cottage style terraced house. But to me, it isn't home. It may be because of the mess, or because I didn't get that feeling people talk about when buying a house, where they love the house as soon as they see it and feel like it's home. It saddened me to realise, that I may never have a home of my own.


The Nomad

From a loving home
Setting out on my own
Finding my own two feet
First here and then there
Adventure turning to despair
Never finding my welcome retreat.

I have had many abodes
And hospitality bestowed
I am thankful to all and to each 
But a little place of my own
Just mine, not on loan
Eludes, always just out of reach.

So I drift ever on
Searching over yon
Realising it may never come true
To have my own door
A roof, walls and floor
I'm a Nomad with an ever changing view.



Thanks for reading. x ;-)


4 comments:

Colin Daives said...

Home isn't about ownership, it's about belonging.

People make a home, not bricks, not money.

Feeling at home is up to you.

Love the poem.

Damp incendiary device said...

I know just what you mean. After initial despair about the sense that the 'home' we live in could be taken at any time, forcing us to move on, I instead chose to see home as the (many) trinkets and oddities we have collected. Paintings and paper flowers, ornaments and sofa. These are the surroundings I call home. If we move, they come too so wherever we land, it still looks like our place, clutter and all.

Echoing Colin; terrific poem. Succinct and clear.

Christo said...

Your comments and poem reminded me of one of my all time favourites:

Home is so Sad
by Philip Larkin

Home is so sad. It stays as it was left,
Shaped to the comfort of the last to go
As if to win them back. Instead, bereft
Of anyone to please, it withers so,
Having no heart to put aside the theft

And turn again to what it started as,
A joyous shot at how things ought to be,
Long fallen wide. You can see how it was:
Look at the pictures and the cutlery.
The music in the piano stool. That vase.

See more at: http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/16659#sthash.nRdxpeoZ.dpuf

Adele said...

Home is where you are with the people you love. You are home honey. Your son makes it so.