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

Monday, 28 February 2011

Gannets in the Sound of Mull



a day of sudden rainbows

against the Ross with its forelit wolf-grey squalliness
the buds of gannets burst pure creamy-white
like punctuation

here where ankle-deep in green water
mountains cluster like cattle

the bird in me wheels
dips for fish
rises again and again
like a white flame

*

the air holds its own trace of me
though the ground I walk on is
nowhere

*

answers are a dereliction, for – look –
we are bathed in the slough of dead stars

*

when ‘I’ am no longer here
still forests will rise and decay
still oceans fill and vaporise

the atoms of me will be distilled
into stamen, bark, shark-tooth

*

something of me may linger
in a grand-child’s first steps
the way he smiles
the way she loves to watch
the birds

*

these friends, this light rain at dusk
this life!

*

it's not words that will
save us



– Roselle Angwin

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