Bridget Khursheed

SWEETHOPE

Noun: place name, a piece of raised or enclosed land
in the midst of fen, marsh, or waste land

A hope of something better
or at least something we can work with
but what if we stumble outside the enclosure
tangling in the briar-made fences
lose ourselves in the moonless night
there is so much space beyond

and even within
at any time this poor land can flood
all our careful tilling lost in mud
bright hopeful seedlings
sunk and only a wooden post top
to show the care we took

but then we believe the house still stands
after all its structure of quiet rooms
the tiled scoured dairy
our inscrutable hearth all its embers
ashed and washed until of course
we light everything up all over again.

 Bridget Khursheed is a poet and geek based in the Scottish Borders. A Scottish Book Trust New Writers Award winner for poetry, her work has appeared in The Rialto, Ambit, The Cormorant, The London Magazine, Abridged and Gutter. Her collections Exact colour of snow and The Last Days of Petrol are published by Shearsman Books. Her novel The Cellarman from Bourjo Press came out earlier this year.

Bridget had this to say about her poem:

Sweethope is a place name near where I live that crops up in my birdwatcher WhatsApp. My poetry often focuses on place in comparison to what went before and a possibly threatened future. In Scots, a ‘hope’ can be a small upland valley or hollow enclosed at the upper end by green hills or ridges. In old English the definition includes a piece of farmland enclosed in marshland. The poem above explores one such fragile reclamation and its vulnerability in a time of climate change; the strength of the people who first made the place and tend it still.