afterwards (poem)

Saturday 14 November 2015

I’d been doing a lot of nothing – hours gazing at all 

three species of sparrow come for crumbs on the chill 

flagstones; watching the bare limbs of ash jubilate 

at the play of breeze in their topmost twigs, where 

a clump of keys does a good job of miming ‘blackbird’. 

Or I guess this is nothing; after yesterday I suspect 

it may instead be everything. I’m still alive: earth 

beneath my feet remains solid; no mesh has simply 

let me fall through as if my life doesn’t count. 

Winter broke today; winds reared above the hills

and trampled their way through the forest.

Though the morning was blue, the cold had come in.

We didn't want to stay cocooned in our Britishness 

but didn’t know where to go either. We’d wanted 

a day out, but not this way. It was a comfort, though, 

to visit that dolmen, Ti Ar Boudiged; to track the slender

tensile thread of continuing humanity back 5000 years,

to remember that we don’t have to forget. It was 

a comfort to talk to the living, Bretons and French

alike. So when we met the man at the gusty top of the hill

we spoke of everything else: the chapel, the land, 

the Breton language, the nuclear power station 

at the edge of lake and what a strange marker

it is on the earth-current alignments below us, 

of how Louis Quatorze trashed the woodland to make 

his warships. Then we were silent and I didn’t know

how to speak of what had happened because

how can you say ‘I’m sorry’ in the face of the scale

of it all? But I said it’s a hard day for France

and he smiled grimly or perhaps sadly and nodded 

and looked away, and I liked his dignity and that we 

two strangers had shared a conversation across borders.

I can’t believe it’s right to make poems from others’

misfortunes, though I know we too need release.

So this is not a poem about tragedy, but about the living. 

And it’s about how at the top of Mont St Michel, 

not the island one but the one in the Monts d’Arrée, 

where the dogs were buffeted nearly off the side 

of the slope, a storm so fierce I couldn't see 

blew us empty from the inside out. 

© Roselle Angwin 2015