In this week’s poem, Sherry Barker Abaldo introduces us to an evocative word, and so to a particular mood or state of soul. I love how this poem leaps reachingly between ideas and stanzas, and how the word’s meaning, revealed in the final lines, rises suddenly to fill the heart.

Abaldo grew up in Union. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, Rattle, Down East Magazine and on PBS, The History Channel and elsewhere. She currently divides her time between rural Maine and Las Vegas.

Poets, please note that submissions to Deep Water are open now and through the end of the year. Deep Water is especially eager to share poems by Black writers, writers of color, Indigenous writers, LGBTQ+ writers and other underrepresented voices. You’ll find a link to submit in the credits below.

Hiraeth

is a word that keeps popping up in my feed
since the pandemic.

Biblical.
Welsh.

I don’t know how to
pronounce it.

Easy to tell what I searched in the
closed buds of those days:

cute or funny animals,
people making butter, sometimes

love, truffle hunting,
quotes from

artists who killed themselves.
My friends have disappeared.

You ask what I mean to you, and
the best I can do is the air inside a flame.

You smell like pine trees. I show you
the word, whisper it means longing

for a home that never existed
or has been irretrievably lost.

— Sherry Barker Abaldo

Megan Grumbling is a poet and writer who lives in Portland. Deep Water: Maine Poems is produced in collaboration with the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance. “Hiraeth,” copyright 2024 by Sherry Barker Abaldo, appears by permission of the author. Submissions to Deep Water are open now and through the end of the year. For more information, go to mainewriters.org/deep-water.