by Sara Henning
Hiraeth (2015)
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
—Mary Oliver, “The Summer Day”
Buckhannon, West Virginia
Outside this window, ice holds a séance.
Wind possesses the hemlocks. Mountain holly
flames and exhales. It’s been years since I’ve let weather
charm me with such a haint’s sorrow. I’ve walked numb
through its weeping. It took me years to know
cold as a kind of tenderness. A practice. A resistance.
Once, driving across Iowa to my mother’s house,
an ice storm broke the sky like her cancer broke through me,
soybean fields velveted, windmills cutting vicious
as snow plumed its burden down. I wanted to go on.
My mother was dying. I was desperate, stupid enough
to choose recklessness. My husband refused,
pulled over, booked a room for the night at a Super 8
near Des Moines. Dinner was vending machine popcorn,
M*A*S*H from the Magnavox TV flashing
the dark room alive. A student from my university
kept going. He wasn’t one of mine. Like me,
he was speeding home, spinning out. When a car
from the next lane smashed into him, his body flew out
of the driver’s-side window. He wasn’t wearing
a seatbelt. The police found him like that, no bruises
or broken bones, just his mother’s perfect boy
embalmed in snow. What do I know? I’m childless.
I’m motherless. How dare I talk to him every time the snow
comes calling? That night in Iowa, I didn’t know
God was coming for any of us. In this city,
snow has the audacity to catch in my eyelashes.
He’s everywhere, the dead boy, sleeping in ditches
which once bloomed with wildflowers.
Last year, one of my students taught me the word hiraeth,
a Welsh word with no English translation.
She told me it meant longing for a home that does not exist.
She holds the home of her childhood in her mind
when she says this, walls which still echo
her dead mother’s laughter. Outside this window,
mountain hollies, hemlock, ice raising up ghosts.
Everything is hiraeth. Cold’s tenderness. I’d still choose
my mother over my own life.
Sara Henning is the author of the poetry collections Burn (Southern Illinois University Press, 2024), a Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Editor’s Selection; Terra Incognita (Ohio University Press, 2022), winner of the 2021 Hollis Summers Poetry Prize; and View from True North (Southern Illinois University Press, 2018), winner of the 2017 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Open Competition Award and the 2019 High Plains Book Award. She teaches creative writing at Marshall University, where she coordinates the A.E. Stringer Visiting Writers Series.