Summary

‘Homing’ explores the relationship between language, identity, and inheritance. The speaker addresses a departed relative (likely a mother or grandmother) who spent her life suppressing her native Black Country accent. This accent, once locked away by the violence of elocution lessons and social shame, only occasionally escaped in unguarded moments. The speaker remembers these brief flashes with affection, treasuring the earthy musicality of her lost dialect.

Now clearing the relative’s house after her death, the speaker yearns not for possessions but for the metaphorical “box” where the accent was hidden. She imagines unlocking it to release the long-buried words like “bibble,” “fittle,” and “tay,” with their rich textures and cultural weight. The desire to reclaim this voice becomes physical, even visceral: the speaker wants to ingest the sounds and stories, to embody the lost world of industry, labour, and red-brick working-class life.

In the final stanza, this impulse culminates in forging the old voice like metal and sending it skyward “like pigeons.” The title’s double meaning – creating a home and returning home – encapsulates the poem’s central message that language is both a point of origin and a point of return.