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 24 January 2014

two poems

What I could have said

It is winter and the sky
is a grand loneliness
I could have said
snowdrops
are beginning to write
themselves into being
I could have said
(now we’re the other side
of last year’s winter)
‘stay – stay here with me’
but I’m not sure
who would’ve heard it
with all that rain
and all those miles
between

© Roselle Angwin 2014


Dharma

I open the door and let you back in,
old friend, and can’t believe how long
I left you standing out there leaning
on the wall, for it’s not your way to insist,
and how often – in sun, in rain, in cold –
while I forget about you and yours;
and now how good it is to talk with you
again, let my steps fall in with your own.
How I emerge each time from dream.
Lightning in a summer cloud; bubble in a stream.


© Roselle Angwin 2014



6 comments:

  1. Love them both. Beautifully poignant, tauntingly cryptic at times which means you have to read and read again – never a bad thing.
    '. . . snowdrops are beginning to write themselves into being . . .' Inspired.
    Keep them coming,
    Miriam x

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  2. Miriam, thank you! (Thank you too for the emailed correction of 'tauntingly' to 'tantalisingly'! - though I thought 'taunting' was tantalising!). Rx

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  3. Oh Roselle, what lovely poems!! I I read once that poetry is a way of breathing...seems so appropriate to what you manage to do, and the reading of them too - as though the air molecules around me are reconfigured, amazingly, essentially.. and I love that they weave braids in words between eye, heart and mind..one comes away from them simultaeneously more whole and less full! Thank you for the beauty...

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  4. Thank you, Anonymous - (I wish I knew which Anonymous you are - I have a sense of your identity, but am not certain.) Anyway - I'm touched by your kind words, and I'm liking v much the poetic nature of words you're using too. And yes I like the idea of poetry and breath being - if not synonymous then at least connected.

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  5. Dear Roselle, I'm sure your senses will be correct, that would no longer seem very strange to me, since mystery seems to have become the norm, though writing it out here would be. Suffice to say, the gratitude goes, I feel, beyond any identity, yours or mine..though is of course intrinsically experienced within it. Thank you again.cx

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  6. C, thank you - again. Yes, slipping the identities we wear as if they are solid and immutable seems the task of the spiritual life, in some ways, to me. Rx

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