The Reluctant Natives

Fate landed us here by mistake, set us to walk
Welsh hillsides with a plodding heart
or paddle Essex estuaries under duress, our talk

always of somewhere else (tacked to kitchen walls
a Swedish lake, a mountain range in Switzerland).
See us crouch in living rooms as daylight palls,

an old draught trespassing beneath the door, the trick
of day too quickly turning night, the radio’s
relentless classic serial, that Sunday evening tick

of now becoming then. Hear us planning new
retreats, rephrasing sentences it takes
a lifetime to pronounce — How nice to meet you

in Hungarian, or I’m from Hull in faulty Greek —
curtains drawn against the rain, against
the pale countrymen to whom we rarely speak