the light that accrues

Such a small space between

Last night when I couldn’t sleep I got up and looked

at the stars, and that light that accrues

on horizons even at night. Birth and death

seemed such small concepts; and what’s between

squeezed like breath, and so arbitrarily; and we all

think we’re so malnourished in the realm of the heart.

Still, in this morning’s brilliant sun before this salt

dusting of sleet, I watched three white egrets

paddle in the bullocks’ mud like hunched dwarf

angels, and the fibre-optics man climbed down

from his thrumming cab and smiled as he let me through

even though I’d moved the ROAD CLOSED barrier –

perhaps because of the sun, or because I’m

a woman; or maybe because the earth’s still

spinning, and we haven’t yet fallen off.

~ Roselle Angwin, in forthcoming All the Missing Names of Love (IDP, April 2012)