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

Friday 11 November 2011

the news from here in just over 200 words

Sun in Scorpio, full moon in Taurus: god of the underworld meets goddess of fecundity. 11th of 11th. Remembrance Day; Day of World Peace. And we live in a world that still manufactures cluster bombs to shred small children.

Rain. Here some comfort in walking in the damp Devon lanes: redwings and fieldfares overhead, come in from migration; a flock of thrushes turning over wet leaves. From the woods an unbearably sweet burst of birdsong, fleeting and ethereal.

And my sister, bird of passage down this afternoon from Scotland. I shall drive us across the moor with its bursts of golden beech leaves over the Dart bridge, then through its clean-washed ochres and rusts and soots to see my mum, whose earthly light is dimming but who manages a beatific smile still at kind words.

And there is another light sliding in. My friend Simon said something beautiful: 'During my time [working] at the hospice, I saw that the journey towards death can be a time of real grace (and of living so close to the soul that it is almost impossible to know whether the emotion is joy or despair).'



And this is also an act of grace:
to see another over this threshold. 


(from 'Rosa Canina', Roselle Angwin, in All the Missing Names of Love, forthcoming IDP 2012

2 comments:

  1. My thoughts are with you at this time of preparation and transition.

    I discovered your blog only recently and am so appreciative of your writing and the thinking behind it.

    ReplyDelete
  2. mm thank you so much for those kind words...

    ReplyDelete

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