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

Thursday, 18 August 2011

The View From Here


is that ‘day’ includes the sky
the wind the house martins
the laughing woodpecker
the breeze that stirs the oleander
that old lilac 2CV on the road below
the river’s brilliant eddies
wisteria leaves stirring
the cicadas the collared dove
my friend’s footstep creaking the stair
the French girls’ voices
passing the gate

is defined by the absence of ‘me’
except as observer and maybe then co-
creator (oh and I forgot the perceived
centre of the universe)

but this world is nothing if not flux
and in fact the ‘me’ that thinks
it’s the whole picture, the whole
great gobsmacking heart of everything
makes only a fistful of ash
out of its particles that are also
waves

the rest both more and less
enduring
is what the wind blows through
passes through this world
on a wingbeat
or the way a cloud does
not static not fixed forever
breaking up and reforming
breaking up again.


Roselle Angwin


No comments:

Post a Comment

Blog Archive