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

Tuesday 15 March 2011

These are the days



These are the days of unspeakable things
and so you dream houses lifted and smashed
like snailshells, the reactor’s heat

rising and rising to peak like the tsunami,
a city in flames. Your nights are an exercise
in navigation, hand over hand, alone.

All the big journeys in the human story
start with a loss. Then there’s the labyrinthine
plummet into darkness, breathless, sealed-in

before the hero’s redemption into light.
And though the world’s troubles can’t be
averted or salved, there are the small

local miracles: the grain quietly swelling
in the fields, the bird at the window.
And here she sits beside you, love the light

at the edge of the wasteland, willing the moment 
when she can believe you might stir, open your eyes,
ask for some soup, a leaf-thin piece of bread.


Roselle Angwin

The phrase 'the light at the edge of the wasteland' is borrowed from Mandy's review of my book on amazon. Thank you, Mandy, for both!



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