I have always admired poets who write home. You can hear the voices of the Colne Valley in the work of Simon Armitage, taste Bara Brith in Dylan Thomas, and scratch Derry soil from the fingernails of Seamus Heaney. Birmingham’s heart beats to the bingy rhythms of Benjamin Zephaniah, and when George Mackay Brown proclaims ‘for the Islands, I sing’, the slates of Stromness resound his verses in a tempered harmony of poet and place. 

I grew up in rural Lincolnshire, and our local shire-poet is Tennyson. There is a statue of him—depicted alongside his literary wolfhound, Karenina—in the grounds outside Lincoln Cathedral. My family moved there from Essex when I was seven, but, a shared love of Arthurian literature aside, I’ve never been able to find a home in Tennyson’s writing. 

I suppose my poetry reflects this sense of homelessness, of unbelonging. I currently live in the Orkney Islands and work in Treaty 7, Southern Alberta. A dual citizen of the UK and Canada, I am an unsettled settler in both places. This is not to say that the concept of ‘nation’ does not travel with me. In this poem, my uncle’s microwaved eggs turn up in the skies over Saskatchewan. But it does take a while to answer questions like ‘what do you do’ and ‘why are you here?’

The poem’s title comes from the Blackfoot name for the 49th parallel—the vast and broadly straight line that separates Canada and the United States. In the mid-19th century, the ‘Medicine Line’ offered sanctuary to Indigenous peoples from American aggression, only to usher in new challenges from the expanding Dominion of Canada. Traversing the line before recent tariffs further calcified the border, this poem considers what we take with us, and what we shed, on the journey to find home.