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 June 2022

a summer solstice 2022 poem, belatedly

 


Moving House at the Summer Solstice – Finistère, 2022

Even before the sun crests the chestnut trees
this thousand-blossom twenty-foot fountain of fragrance
spreads her white invitation across this and the other
wild gardens, and already a hundred bees have rspv’d.

She was a slip when I planted her five years ago,
rooting so easily into her non-native soil. I could
linger here under her arch, at a kind of midsummer
crossroads like the one where I saw the hare yesterday,

I could borrow her unstintingness, belonging
to the universe so easily, breathing out freely,
without holding some back for myself, without asking
where home might be. At this midsummer turning,

how to unmoor the self from ‘I’, ‘me’, ‘my’? – simply to rest
between earth and sky, this whole wide world my home.


Roselle Angwin

 

 

 

 

 

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