Veronika Winkels: ‘Homecoming or What Poets Know’

Homecoming or What Poets Know

Homecoming is
a return to the place
the path diverged;
and seeing all
Frost’s fated choice meant:
the hope,
tempered by experience,
but not by it quenched.

It is Lewis’ country,
still undiscovered,
but intimated
in all lovely things—
birdsong was richer,
and echoed further
when I was younger,
purer.

It is Eliot’s Little Gidding,
that place to which we return
and for the first time know,
where are one
the fire and the rose,
and the memory of a face
common to all,
which in childhood we saw.

Is it the echoes and peripheries?
the sun too bright to see?
the ever distant peak?
—what words cannot speak
is The Word we daily flee,
but may return to one day,
and begin to see.

Veronika Winkels