Hiraeth

I have journeyed
Over the permafrost of past hurts
Held by the less emotional

Always stepping lightly
Fearful of breaking the translucent patches
That will send me down
Into the depths of their denial

I poise like a water strider
Feeling the surface tension
But never fully immersed
For there are Pike
Who will devour me

Like Jonah I travel in the darkness
Never to return
Unless regurgitated
Or transmuted
Arriving at where I should be
An artefact of destiny

I breathe the lung freezing squalid air
Under the pack ice of their lives
Using my inner fire
To keep the frost at bay

I must be an ice breaker
Allow the sublimation of my soul
To break through fixed expectations
The chill wind of energy draining dramas
Causing a Seal transmutation
Surviving the pressure of change
Into something alien to my actualisation

A foreign body to those
Whose blood culture has been contaminated
By those who have abandoned theirs
Living in a cultural pocket of their own making
Devoid of life giving air
Provided by the bellows of change

I fight for breath
Feeling the deposition around me
Of their unexpected passion
Hard soft hot cold
Never constant, ever shifting
Unrelenting abominable snowmen
Intent on devouring my state of being
Engulfing me in their Sisyphean lack of discretion

I yearn for my own kind
Like a wolf baying in the arctic moonlight
Hearing with my heart across the miles
The call of Hiraeth
And in the hearing
Find my way home