until exile too is home (a poem)

for Jo


My friend says we experience loss at every turn. We know about exile. Here the stoic stove-pipe emits its steely ticks, the flames transmuting earth and water back to air.

My longings carry me across the skies like swallows, until exile becomes a steady state, almost a benediction, and the longing for a home, for home, becomes in itself belonging.

          A predominance of blue.

I learn of nourishment from the inconstancy of cloud, from transience, from loss. I remember
that the grass can grow without me. I set fire by mistake
to the inner forest, which seems more thickly-wooded every day.

                                                                Some days
I have an urge to cast myself upon the waves, be borne away like Neruda’s dark stone

knowing nothing of time, or homesickness.



© Roselle Angwin 2010