Home
i.
At night wearing a woollen hat, I could not sleep for the cold. You sat beside the bed playing your guitar. I dream of that time. I cried one afternoon and said: I want to go home. And you knew the home I wanted to go back to.
ii.
'I’m lost,' you said, deep in the back seat. I did not look to the rearview mirror for your eyes. My hands steady at the wheel. The night’s motorway strip where once I had crossed the line. Shaking by the roadside, waiting for my hands to be still. The glare of the seawall; the moon mocking my chaos and near death. You leaned forward, I could feel you shift and I thought of your wife.
iii.
On seeing the children arriving home. Their mother herding them from the car. Her key in the front door... the biscuit, or the sandwich? A dialogue with the cupboard. The fridge I used to love.
iv.
Dreaming of something coming along. Something in the mail that changes things. A rider with a letter. Other letters you did not want, knew in your heart they were coming; woke in a sweat; heard the messenger; her solemn face. All letters are on their way, like icebergs cracked from the arctic shelf; 15,000 years to form and finally melt, leaving a pile of stones that drift to the bottom and disperse.
Wes Lee lives in Eastbourne. She has four poetry collections - her latest, Wearing Today, was shortlisted for The Kathleen Grattan Award 2023 (Otago University Press). Most recently she was awarded the Magma Editors' Prize 2024/25; the 2024 Free Verse Prize, by The Poetry Society, in London, and the Heroines/Joyce Parkes Women's Writing Prize 2022, in New South Wales.
