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

Tuesday 5 November 2019

Frog Medicine 2 at Samhain (poem)


             Frog Medicine 2 at Samhain
                    ‘Nothing is what it appears to be’, ‘Frog’, Philip Carr-Gomm


You, tiny red swimmer
taking refuge from the storm
in the waterbowl this morning
you, limbs asplay
you, spirit of the rain
reminding me of something quiet
something I can’t quite grasp

under the gale’s lash
under the whipped boughs
trees freed from their raiment of leaves
wind almost thick enough
to smell     to taste
almost a colour
colour denoting absence

*

to be possessed by absence
to know you possess
nothing
you can call your own

*

floodwater excoriating the thin strip
of red earth crossing the county
east to west
the earth’s one skin less
the earth’s one harvest less

(our childhood’s cornfields
high as our waists
the blaze of corn poppies
our childhood reverberating
in another unvisitable continent)

*

to possess, a fable
to be possessed, a fable

*

taking refuge in the mutable –
element of water (you, red swimmer
spirit of the rain), element of earth –

frog with your tiny red feet
frog in the waterbowl
frog clambering up over rocks
frog rising up in the well

here in deep shade
here in the lee of the gale
here where the moment begins
taking refuge
again and again

spirit of rain
at the earth’s dark turning

time of the Crone
Samhain



© Roselle Angwin 2019






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