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

Saturday 11 June 2011

poem: not in our name

For the last two or three months I've been posting poems by my Two Rivers group from our anthology, Confluence. We've come to the end now; I'm the last poet in the book. I shan't give you a spiel of stuff about me – you can find that elsewhere on the blog, and if you've been following this then you'll have heard plenty anyway!

I guess this little poem is just as valid, sadly, for our time now (Libya etc) as it was when I wrote it early in this new century – already so many wars; and that goes, I guess, for all time (substitute 'horse' for 'tank' maybe...). When will we ever...?



Not In Our Name

The day the news came we walked
in the Burrows back of the dunes
in the faintness of the breakers’ roar.
What I remember now are the inscrutable
eyes of the viper’s bugloss flowers,
their celestial blue almost but not yet
utterly crushed in the relentless tracks
of military trucks at practice in our name.



Roselle Angwin

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