2,000 Miles
2,000 miles. It’s very far. From here,
that’s Nuuk, in Greenland,
simultaneously Scandinavia and North America,
where the manngqqak falls on the timber chapel roof
and artificial turf, the fishing fleet frozen in,
where the permafrost glistens as it pulls back
from the blue-eyed grassland, as they sing from the throat,
2,000 miles. It’s very far. Go south,
to Nicosia, Cyprus, the cobwebs solid in the olive trees
and flurries of χιόνι and kar in the DMZ,
icicles on the partition walls and all and sundry
wondering how it can be this cold on an island in the Med,
and yet from the bars and the churches they sing
2,000 miles. It’s very far. Out east,
in Yemva, they’re shovelling the concrete clear
and melting the снег on the station steps,
a couple waiting for their conscript son
to come back from a war they don’t support,
a candle lit until he’s home.
White and grey as far as the eye can see,
but under their visible breath they sing
Like us: 2,000 miles. It’s very far,
but beneath the North star we’re all singing
the same songs to each other, even though
we don’t think we have anything in common, but snow.
I’m starting to sense how this Advent Calendar is going to work – have a decent idea in the morning, procrastinate all day and go off it by the evening, but then writing it because you’ve run out of time to come up with anything better. Still, at least I’m having ideas at all, and I quite like that today’s Door follows on, sort of, from yesterday’s, with its musical origins and search for what unites us all.
And OK, perhaps I need to spray a bit more antifreeze on my rose-tinted glasses, as this has ended up a quite simplistic spin of the globe, and I worry a bit that I’ve gone a bit Cecil Rhodes with my fairly wide-eyed innocent skewering of cultures beyond my own. No disrespect is intended to the good citizens of Nuuk, Nicosia or Yemva – I’d like to see all these places in person one day, and maybe then I’ll write something that captures the soul of these beautiful municipalities a bit more accurately, a bit less generically.
But it’s the thought (fort) that counts, and today has been spent thinking about those as far away as the narrator of The Pretenders’ iconic Christmas song, and whether they’ve heard it, and whether they too are thinking about those 2,000 miles away. In one direction, that’ll be here, which is nice, and in the other, who knows. It’s an endless game of pass-it-on leapfrog around the whole globe and back again. It is very far, but it’s not that far that we can’t think of each other and be glad, whatever we do – or don’t – have in common. We’re all the same distance apart.
(I did check, by the way – those two cities and one town are all, give or take, 2,000 miles from Witney, where I live and grew up. I had to do a little bit of rounding but you’d be close enough, certainly within a shuttle bus ride of the town centre, and allowing for the curvature of the Earth, I don’t think that’s too bad. As I say, it’s the thought that counts.)
Talking of which, I’ll keep the rest of it in headspace. Hope you liked the poem.
I’ll think of you, wherever you go. Twenty-three days to go.
Owen x
PS If someone in Greenland reads this blog for the first time, I’ll be absolutely delighted – I’m trying to pick up at least one viewer in every territory on Earth and am about 33% of the way there; on which note, hello and рождество құтты болсын to my new reader in Kazakhstan…
The Poetry Advent Calendar 