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 20 December 2019

winter solstice poem 2019



 

If light is still possible (poem for the winter solstice 2019)

The dark days are darker
claustrophobia closing in and this endless rain here

half the globe on fire and the other in flood
the times almost biblical

trudging the dog up the sodden lane
plodding in mud past the black bullocks’ field

the stench of slaughterhouse waste    blood and bones
dead kin cruelly heaped right beside where they’re grazed

the dark days darker and distances eclipsed
entering the darkness from a dark year

everything seems broken or dead or dying
but look – a small light at the selvedge

of the black woods    the egret is back
white-pacing the ribbon of brook   priestly   processing

a reminder of hope   of possibility
and soon the sun will enter its own dark time

stand still for three days    then emerge
from the thicket of night borne and reborn

in the horns of this young roebuck
stealthily slipping into light



© Roselle Angwin 2019







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