25.05.00 : home and away

Thursday 25th May

HOME: from "A Ballad of Home" (Eavan Boland) This house is built on our embrace and there are worse foundations.

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AWAY: to err (verb): to wander, ramble, stray; to go astray; to go wrong in judgement or opinion; erratic (adj): prone to wander; nomadic; eccentric in habit or opion. astray (adj): away from the proper path; in error; and, despite the OED, it also means (via the Irish "as a bheabhar") to be "mad".

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HOME: from "Home" (by Paula Meehan) I am the blind woman finding her way home by a map of tune. When the song that is in me is the song I hear from the world I'll be home. It's not written down and I don't remember the words. I know when I hear it I'll have made it myself. I'll be home.

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AWAY: 12. away: of the condition resulting from removal: Gone (from a place); absent; wanting.

* from "Windfall" (Paul Durcan)

Our children swam about our home As if it was their private sea, Their own unique, symbiotic fluid Of which their parents also partook. Such is home - a sea of your own - In which you hang upside down from the ceiling With equanimity, while postcards from Thailand on the mantlepiece Are raising their eyebrow markings benignly: Your hands dangling their prayers to the floorboards of your home, Sifting the sands underneath the surfaces of conversations.

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Home and Away: "cian om eolus-sa crioch gusa ranag-sa" ("far from my home / is the country I have reached")
These are lines taken from the Irish epic poem "Sweeney Astray" or "Buile Suibhne" (lines which I've always carried around in my head). Place, here, is not just a location. "Eolas" is defined as "knowledge of direction, way, guidance, bearings; knowledge, learning, skill; a habit, particularly of frequenting a place; a recipe, a prescription or formula; an incantation".
It is also often translated as "home" (as a state of mind).

"A starry frost will come dropping on pools and I'll be astray here on unsheltered heights . . . ."

Shane