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

Sunday 11 March 2012

the light that accrues

Such a small space between

Last night when I couldn’t sleep I got up and looked
at the stars, and that light that accrues
on horizons even at night. Birth and death
seemed such small concepts; and what’s between

squeezed like breath, and so arbitrarily; and we all
think we’re so malnourished in the realm of the heart.
Still, in this morning’s brilliant sun before this salt
dusting of sleet, I watched three white egrets

paddle in the bullocks’ mud like hunched dwarf
angels, and the fibre-optics man climbed down
from his thrumming cab and smiled as he let me through
even though I’d moved the ROAD CLOSED barrier –

perhaps because of the sun, or because I’m
a woman; or maybe because the earth’s still
spinning, and we haven’t yet fallen off.



~ Roselle Angwin, in forthcoming All the Missing Names of Love (IDP, April 2012)

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