Nia Broomhall

Nonostante

Again, I find myself saying this word. It stands
at the top of a garden with my grandfather
outlined against an Italian sky or an English one,
speaks clearly into the yellow or white light,
the shaking heads of tall flowers. It starts
with the soft tenacity of no, of no, of two footsteps
on the doorstep, the echo there of nostro, nonno,
nevertheless. It is a step forward of a word,
a refusal to move, a promise to stay after all;
a withstanding, a standing, the clasp of
his steady brown hand underlined with soil.
He seeded these sounds in the garden, tying stalks
and cutting them, the star-shaped strawflowers
we called everlasting in dry bouquets in the shed,
the nonno we called Grandad who stood quietly
to enlist, to handle a gun he would never fire,
to surrender arms, to board the boat, to work,
to work, to say I do in English in a church
that wasn’t his, to have his paper stamped,
to have his paper stamped, to have his paper
stamped. And despite it all, tutti gli anni, this word
that ends in tutting disapproval, it is a word
obstinate enough to take root, to lean into
the italics of the wind, to love regardless, to stand,
to grow paper-petalled stems the colours of the land.

Nia Broomhall has just completed her MA in Creative Writing with Lancaster University. Currently Head of English at a comprehensive school in Surrey, she has been teaching for 22 years. She was Highly Commended in the Winchester Poetry Prize in 2022, longlisted for their 2023 prize, and has been published this year by Magma and Black Bough Poetry.

Nia wrote the following about ‘Nonostante’:

This poem was begun during one of Kim Moore and Clare Shaw’s online January Writing Hours. We looked at the gorgeous poem ‘Foxglove Country’ by Zaffar Kunial, which unpacks the word foxglove itself, and were challenged to write about a word we were drawn to in a similar way. I picked the Italian word nonostante, meaning despite. The solid sounds and rich associations of this word could not help but evoke my grandfather, who was brought to England as a prisoner of war in WWII and never returned home, putting figurative and literal roots down in Somerset.