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 28 October 2011

bookmark


Rain storming down from the orchard with its turbulence of leaves and wind battering till all thought’s gone out

spent as matches and it’s a relief and then here I am again with the wet dog with books and poems as friends and a million different ways of greeting the world

                                                and there outside at last a single thin blade of sun insinuates itself like a bookmark between cloud

and something new pours down onto the hillside and I’m out there flying

            and it doesn’t matter whether sun rain wind or even sleet at the moment suddenly again what matters is simply being alive
                                    and how poetry can remind me of this even at times when I’m dense as peat-soil sodden and soaking it all up

                                                ready to transform it like worms compost      into something I can work with    something good    in bare hands    in the mouth                   something to slip between me and eternity and the terrible joy of it all

2 comments:

  1. Oh, Roselle - your poetry is so beautiful - you always take me to another realm where I marvel at your choice of words and how they /you lighten my heart.....thank you...

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  2. Trish how kind of you! And how lovely to hear from you, too. Thanks so much - I wasn't really thinking of that one as a poem, more as an unedited freewrite! But I'm so pleased you liked it. We need to keep looking for those bookmarks, don't we...x

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