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

Wednesday 17 April 2019

Coming away from the island


Hugs, tears, laughter. After the wind-stopped ferries, the sea is brushed steel; lochs and mountains filtered as if through muslin.

First spit of rain: no waterfalls on Mull this year; no snow on the peaks;  rivers so low; no mud for the sand and house martins, soon back, to build nests.



Loch Lomond’s pewter distances catch the heart.

Then ahead, a car crash; abrupt re-entry into the sorrows of the world.

Samira Ahmed says we’re either collaborators or resistors. For change to happen, we need to resist: non-violently but firmly.

In London, Extinction Rebellion protestors are arrested for blocking roads. Never mind the multinationals, the tax-evading corporations, big industry, private bankers, pharmaceutical companies, heads of state with their disastrous policies.

In Paris, they mourn 800 years of cathedral, part-eaten by flame.

There is as much microplastic in a remote area of the Pyrenees as in a major city. We, all species, are breathing, drinking, eating it in. #REFUSE PLASTIC. If you do nothing else this year. If we don’t oppose it we are complicit. Or collaborators.

‘Earth is flat’ reads the graffiti on a traffic sign outside Glasgow.

Everywhere new leaves – 100 shades of green. New flowers – as if the first ever: windflowers (her face), lady’s smock, bluebells, cherry blossom.

Despite.











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