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

Saturday, 22 October 2016

wild geese

Category:Urnersee Category:Goose [http://flickr.com/photos/43039814@N00 Rudolf Ammann]Creative Commons

What is it about migrating wild geese that so cuts at the heart?

When we see wild geese flying over the valley here, it's perhaps 7 or 8.

This lunchtime, coming back from Totnes, approximately 200 flew ahead of me crossing the hillside, in several breaking vees. Hard to keep the car on an even course: I wanted to stop, get out, jubilate, fly.

So many poets write about them (Mark Doty, Mary Oliver, Kathleen Jamie for 3).

Here's the Mark Doty one I'm thinking of: http://www.dactyls-and-drakes.com/literatu…/poetry/migratory

And here's one of my own about wild swans (does that count?), written on the Isle of Iona, about migrating whoopers:

Almost a Prayer

After we’d trudged so far to the pass at the top
of the island, rain and wind beating our faces,

rising like a single uncluttered thought
from the lochan’s dark mouth a pair of swan,

whoopers, passing through to Siberia,
their curd-white a thickening, a measure

of silence hefted against grey air,
their presence an act of grace, almost a prayer.


© Roselle Angwin, in All the Missing Names of Love, IDP



Do you know about this inspiring project? https://www.flightoftheswans.org/ 
'One woman. 7,000 km. 11 countries. By paramotor.WWT's daring bid to fly with one of nature’s great migrations on a quest to save Bewick’s swans.'

They could do with our help.



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