Harriet Lund

I am a poet and science fiction author whose work explores the raw difficulty of life alongside hopeful undertones. This piece addresses the dangers and beauty of the imagination (personified as a wandering 'creature of the soul'): its power to crush... and to save.

Inspired by a line in Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales", "Ymaginacioun" is written partially in Middle English: the non-standard spellings function, in part, to encapsulate the unconventional state of my body and mind.

As an author with a chronic illness, I have time to daydream. Most of my days are spent in other worlds. Nature often embodies the hopeful aspects of my work, representing the sheer breadth of the imagination, the road to a sunrise.

I studied English Literature at the University of St Andrews in Scotland and achieved a first-class honors degree. I now live in Shropshire, England, in the beauty of the Welsh borders.

I am passionate about linguistics; Anglo-Saxon is one of my great loves. For me, Language represents the potential beauty in non-conformity. Likewise, I am wheelchair-bound, mostly housebound, and unable to work conventionally, but my life has its unique purpose, encapsulated in my Christian faith

Ymaginacioun

We may dyen of the ymaginacioun,

That perellous creature of the soul.

Trauma

Bends my thoughts

To brazen shapes,

Splashes memory

In colours woven to deceive,

Betrays my senses,

Casts me into

A broken-maze reflection of reality

That terrifies in a warped familiar,

In what should not be –

And is.

We may dyen of the ymaginacioun,

That perilous creature of the soul.

Little golden fish

Drown

In the washing-up liquid;

Shadows rave and creep and tangle

Me

In their nets;

And I am hiding

Under the dining room table,

[Twenty-]six years old,

Hands secure over my head,

Begging not to be found

By what should not be

And is.

We may dyen of the ymaginacioun,

That perellous creature of the soul.

A decade of sikernesse

Splays the lingering hand of meningitis

Across my brain;

Body and mind unstandardised –

Society’s ruls cleer-cut shakn looss

To non-conformity.

And I’m on the floor,

Folded small against the eyes that scream,

Hunted by shadows.

We may dyen of the ymaginacioun,

That perellous creature of the soul,

That weori goost that wanders to and fro,

That wanders…

stretch out my hand

To a door that is not,

Step through

To a place that should not be

And is.

A caress of sensation opens

That weyfarer’s eyes and—

Fingers trailing gold awaken a mountain’s westward slopes.

Dew hangs heavy in the air;

A waist-high sea of mist

S t r e t c h i n g across the valley.

Morning is rich in my nose,

That unique, blissful scent

Of an early morning

Laden

With pre-sunrise dew.

Yet-furled blooms nod their heads

In the rising wind blowing from the mountains.

A wind tinged with the scent of snow on distant peaks,

Of sunrise cresting.

Ymaginacioun,

That creature of the soul,

Mapping worlds

To span neuron-bridges,

Tends a garden grown wild,

Lifts up eyes to distant mountains,

Shods feet to wander,

And

Explores

Website