Hiraeth

KATHRYN JONES

May 6, 2020

My ancestors came from Wales;

I have never been there, but I share

their constant longing

for something

I cannot describe but know in my bones –

hiraeth, a Welsh word for

an incompleteness that yearns,

like a soul wandering alone in the hills

looking for its mate.

I pour myself into the hole of grief these days

and find no bottom; even if I did,

I would crawl back out

and search again

for a place like home but more –

KATHRYN JONES is a longtime journalist, essayist, author, and teacher. A regular contributor to The New York Times and  a contributing editor and former writer-at-large for Texas Monthly magazine, her essays have been published in Texas Monthly and in two anthologies, A Uniquely American Epic: Intimacy and Action, Tenderness and Action in Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch, (University Press of Kentucky, 2019), and Pickers and Poets: The Ruthlessly Poetic Singer-Songwriters of Texas (Texas A&M University Press, 2016 ). She currently teaches journalism at Tarleton State University and is finishing a biography of Ben Johnson, the Academy Award-winning actor (The Last Picture Show, The Wild Bunch) and world champion rodeo cowboy, to be published by the University Press of Mississippi. She was inducted into the Texas Institute of Letters in 2016.