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 3 May 2012

post-beltane beltane post


The Levels, May Day (reprise)

i
Not a leaf moves; not a bird calls.
            I don’t know how long
we stare at each other.
            We don’t know how long we have.
           
There is a drumbeat passes
from cell to cell
             a hot wind hopscotching
                        over the synapses.


ii
Listen – somewhere there is a question
                        knocking      and knocking.
Silence your heart
            and listen
            with all of yourself.


iii
Winds and moons that drive you to madness
            and love
                        which is always a form of madness.


iv
            I stand in the stream’s conversation
bruised wild carrot and water mint
                        wild watercress peppery on my tongue
                                    the astringency of wood sorrel

buzzard lifting off from the broadcast drift of windflower and bluebell
            something squeaking in vain

                                                Bel is back in the watered sky

– and look, on the path, a glow-worm
            drab in the haze of daylight
                                    recharging its cells
            for its small terrestrial shining
                        its pinprick contribution
            to the sum of light in the world


v
            This will go on
                                    wherever you are
            wherever or whatever I am
                        or am not.





*


© Roselle Angwin, 2005



NOTES: this appears in All the Missing Names of Love, Roselle Angwin, IDP May 2012

Bel is an old name for the pagan sungod

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