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 16 November 2012

until exile too is home (a poem)


for Jo


My friend says we experience loss at every turn. We know about exile. Here the stoic stove-pipe emits its steely ticks, the flames transmuting earth and water back to air.

My longings carry me across the skies like swallows, until exile becomes a steady state, almost a benediction, and the longing for a home, for home, becomes in itself belonging.

          A predominance of blue.

I learn of nourishment from the inconstancy of cloud, from transience, from loss. I remember
that the grass can grow without me. I set fire by mistake
to the inner forest, which seems more thickly-wooded every day.

                                                                Some days
I have an urge to cast myself upon the waves, be borne away like Neruda’s dark stone

knowing nothing of time, or homesickness.



© Roselle Angwin 2010











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