Patch 69

PATCH MAKER: Joanna Hope Bricher
LOCATION: Manchester

"This is the land. We have our inheritance."

My patch shares a quote from the poem Ash Wednesday by T S Eliot. It's a beautiful poem that encompasses the paradoxes of life - of hope in the face of very real sadness and despair ("Calm and distressed/Torn and most whole...Exhausted and life-giving..."). The poem also contains a lot of earthy, land-based imagery, which makes me think of the specific things we love when we think of loving 'nature'. A specific patch of ground; the little overgrown pond in the woods I like to sit beside; the shared garden of my rented flat which (under the constant shadow of the threat of development) my neighbours and I have been cultivating for the last nine years. This summer the planning application to build a bungalow on it was approved, despite many objections from the community. I pasted up a linoprint of this part of the poem on the garden wall both as elegy and hope that a kind of justice and new life beyond my understanding is still working, somehow, on a bigger scale than this. That our small, seemingly hopeless, acts of love matter. I wanted to join my personal sadness about the garden and the bittersweet hope in the poem with all our voices as we speak out for our suffering earth, to honour our grief at the same time as protesting the injustices that have led us here. Sadness, anger, love, hope. "And let my cry come unto Thee."