Karly

If you’ve been reading from the beginning, you’ll know that Allie Esiri has a special place on my bookshelf. She curates some of the most beautiful poetry events at the National Theatre and Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre, and she’s a familiar presence at the Hay Festival too. I couldn’t make it to Hay this year, but thank goodness for online passes. I watched the gala from home, and now, naturally, you get to read about it. Except, not quite.
Two poems stayed with me and felt particularly relevant to the stage of life that I’m in, and Allie herself did say that depending on where one was in life they might make you quite emotional, and that, they did. One was Empty Nest by Carol Ann Duffy. The other was This Be The Verse by Philip Larkin. The pairing caught me off guard. It felt deliberate, almost like someone had planned to present the two ends of a truth and leave the audience to sit in the middle. Larkin’s poem is blunt, biting, and famously unforgiving. Duffy’s is quiet, tender, and full of grace. One rails against what we inherit. The other lingers in what we leave behind.
Somewhere between those two is where I live. Or at least where I’ve been learning to.
I have left home many times. Sometimes for practical reasons. I moved abroad to study, to pursue the life I believed I wanted. I followed the logic of deadlines and coursework and credentials. But I have also gone because something inside me needed to. I have taken trips simply to see who I might become in unfamiliar places. I have walked through cities where no one knew my name. I have built routines in rooms I didn’t think I’d stay in for long. I have left because I felt I needed to grow. And I have returned when I needed to be held.
The first real goodbye was when I was eighteen. I told my mother I was moving to Ireland to live with a host family I had never met. I was not chasing a career or a dream exactly, just possibility. She could have said I was too young, or that it was too soon. She didn’t. She helped me pack. She folded my things with more care than I did. She asked me to let her know when I landed, and to message often. When we said goodbye at the airport, she hugged me tightly, and only when I turned away did she cry.
My mother never left home the way I have. She did not grow up with the same opportunities, the same cultural permission to go far. She stayed closer to where she was raised, and yet she never tried to tie me to the same pattern. My life has stretched across countries and timelines and versions of myself I didn’t always recognise. She has never asked me to stop. She has never questioned the strange shape my twenties have taken. She has only ever wanted me to feel free and to feel safe.
That kind of love is not loud, but it is strong. It shows up again and again, in quiet acts and soft encouragement. My mother is not someone who demands a speech. She pays attention instead. She listens without rushing to fix things. She lets the conversation unfold.
Still, I know my absence weighs something. She doesn’t say it, but I see it in the small details. The spot on the sofa where I usually sit is always empty when I’m away. The pink air fryer I bought when I was too scared to get my gallbladder out so resorted to cooking with no fat whatsoever is now mostly untouched. There is no pastry on a plate with a glass of water to take my allergy medicine and probiotics. No Taylor Swift blasting from the study. These are not big things, but they add up. They are the shape of my presence. And when I am gone, they are the shape of the silence.
Empty Nest speaks from that quiet space. The poem is a mother’s voice remembering the child who once lived within the rhythm of her house. There is no resentment in the poem, no bitterness. Only stillness. The kind that comes with love that lets go. It reminded me of my own mother. Not because she fits into the same poetic frame, but because she, too, knows what it is to let a daughter become someone far away.
Then there is Larkin. “They fuck you up, your mum and dad.” It is a poem that startles people, and it is supposed to. He says it with the confidence of someone who believes damage is inevitable. That all we can do is survive it, pass it on a little less loudly, or not at all, since he does say “… and don’t have any children yourself”, and hope that is enough. I do not fully believe in that version of things, but I understand why people hold on to that poem. It names the fear so many carry, that they are broken not by choice but by inheritance.
Larkin was right about one thing. Parents do shape you. And sometimes they shape you in opposite directions. I grew up as a child of divorce, but not in the kind of arrangement where you float easily between households. My parents didn’t really co-parent. They simply existed on separate paths, and I existed somewhere in between. Over the years, my relationship with my father became quieter and more distant. These days, we don’t talk much beyond a polite hello. It is not dramatic, but it is still a loss.
So when I hear Larkin’s voice in that poem, I recognise the sharpness. The absence. The unanswered questions. The silence where something else might have lived. I do not agree with all of it, but I do not dismiss it either.
That said, my story does not begin or end with absence. Because I also grew up with a mother who stayed. Not just physically, but emotionally. She showed up in ways that mattered. She never tried to overcorrect for what I didn’t have. She simply gave what she could, fully and without conditions. She never made me feel like I needed to earn her love. She never made me feel small for wanting to go. She never made me feel like coming back was a failure.
Each time I return, something has shifted in me. A new thought. A quieter way of being. A version of myself that feels further from who I was the last time. And she makes room for that. She never holds me to old versions. She just lets me take my place again in the house. And through that, I relearn how to take my place in myself.
I am home again now. For a while. Long enough to breathe, and to think, and to exist among the soft details of daily life. Long enough to sit in the living room and feel like I belong. Long enough to remember that the door has always been open, even when I could not see it.
She leaves it open still. Not just the literal door, but the emotional one. The one that says you can go and you can come back. The one that says whoever you are now is still welcome. The one that has never once been closed, even when I returned different, even when I did not know how to ask for it.
Between the sharp truth of Larkin’s poem and the quiet ache of Duffy’s, I am writing my own kind of verse. It is one made of movement, of return. It is not perfect, but it is real. And it sounds, more than anything else, like home.

If the event from Hay Festival becomes available on the Hay Anytime platform, I will be linking it here, but you can find these two poems, and more on the subject matter, in Allie Esiri’s 365 Poems for Life anthology, available on Kindle and a beautiful hardback! (and no, I don’t get commission, we genuinely love her books in this blog). And if you’d like to read more about why I like them so much, feel free to read this post I wrote back in January.