from BARDO

The stars are in our belly; the Milky Way our umbilicus.

Is it a consolation that the stuff of which we’re made

is star-stuff too?


– That wherever you go you can never fully disappear –

dispersal only: carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen.


Tree, rain, coal, glow-worm, horse, gnat, rock.


Roselle Angwin

Thursday, 13 January 2011

a note for Charles Wright

'First light in the east last light in the west and us in between...
Leaning against the invisible...' Charles Wright

All night rain on the skylight
the courtyard at seven still creased with darkness
hauntings of owls and bats
and unbelievably (winter, big wind shaking the hillside)
the first blackbird starting up speaking of spring

on the news that young boy in Brisbane
saving his brother from flood water
at the cost of his own life

yesterday with C in the Law Courts (by the river
where the sand barge has been rusting forever
estuarine tide depleted, quicksand lolling innocent and pale) 
she too ill to fight for what was rightfully hers
but the judge restoring it anyway 

(murmurs from the mudflats' resident geese, a trio of swan, gulls
the black and white avocets in their equivocacy)

the earth rolls on
our cycles of life and decay
just as it is, has been –
and the sums of our attachments breaking
our hearts, both enabling and keeping us from
flight

and what might save us
perhaps only the faith that what has been lost
may find its way back, in time
to where it belongs


Roselle Angwin

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