Considering Names of Things While Sitting on a Bench in the Low Field with my Father by Louise Longson

Considering Names of Things While Sitting on a Bench in the Low Field with my Father

(for Josef Bolesław Łyczba)

He says he knows what they are,

but not what they are called.

It’s a sheep, but in German

it’s called a Schaf, in Polish, an owca 

but even if you know the names for it,

you still know nothing about the animal,

just the words we use to try and fix

a meaning on a thing we do

not truly understand.

All his life he tended them

from birth to table,

but his mind now shears and dips

in an unreliable shepherding

of information; locked in this pen

of memory

I try to follow him, down this black hole

to oblivion, where forgotten atoms of his story

have been vacuumed up.

All our lives I have marvelled

at the nothing that kept us apart

together

gazing past one another into space,

where I know the name of love,

but am no nearer an understanding.

Louise Longson started writing ‘with intent’ during isolation in lockdown 2020. Since then, her work has become widely published in print and online and pushcart nominated. She is the author of Hanging Fire (Dreich Publications, 2021) and Songs from the Witch Bottle (Alien Buddha Press, 2022).  In 2023 she won the Kari-Ann Flickinger Literary Memorial Prize with the collection These are her thoughts as she falls. In 2024, Louise was highly commended for the Geoff Stevens Prize by Indigo Dreams Publishing and won the Hedgehog Press Proper Poetry Pamphlet prize with The How in the World, which will be published in 2025. Her poems bring together her personal and professional experiences working in mental health, trauma and recovery, translated through the twin prisms of myth and nature.

Twitter @LouisePoetical   Bluesky: @louisepoetical.bsky.social