The English language may have no word that corresponds exactly to the Welsh ‘hiraeth’ or the Scots Gaelic ‘cianalas’, an overwhelming sense of love and loss felt by those exiled from a particular region dear to them, but that does not stop our poets expressing such a feeling, as Molly Holden does here, conjuring up her beloved Wiltshire downs. But though at one level this poem is clearly about actual lilies in actual landscapes, at another I think it may also be saying something about how the poet sees her own work: that her affinity is not for the luxurious and well-tended blooms grown in fertile gardens, but for those made all the more beautiful to her for being rooted in starveling soil, just as her poems have grown out of the difficult circumstances of her illness (see week 2).

I grow these white lilies

I grow these white lilies for homesickness.

Here they are set on clay, in a scoop
of midland valley, backed by a creosote fence,
luxuriant gardens. Over them droop
roses and raspberries, willow and almond tree.
This seems their element. Here they should thrive.

I grow them for this memory though – of lilies
spare as sticks, their flowers more waxenly alive
than these, by cinder paths in flat, infertile
gardens in the downs, rooted in chalk and flint,
heady and sweet by day against bare slopes,
scent and sentinel both by moonlight’s glint.

These are not they, are no compensation
for those lost lilies growing in that lost land.
But, as I reach to touch inferior petals,
I think I see the chalk beneath my hand.

Molly Holden