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 21 March 2019

spring equinox 2019 poem



Spring equinox: everything renews itself




The wind    the jackdaws    their spill of wild play
brightening the new spring greyness

the spring comes with this
soft rain    and everything renews itself

today it’s raining in the lowlands

everything renews itself    and me too

though perhaps not the stars in any
time scheme humans can relate to   

I am not there but the lens in my mind
is imprinted    the pony grove    my old dog

wizened Dartmoor oaks    and you supine
on that long flat rock    magma billennia-cooled

you firing up the day in a green blaze

everything has renewed itself every cell new

it was that day we saw the dipper
spoke of its ability to walk underwater

how a nest site might be used for forty generations
of dipper    but we are not dippers

and we are not there    I am not there and I’m not
who I was   each bit of me remade now

I am not there    today it’s raining in the lowlands

dog violets coaxed out of their green blanket

spring comes    the spring comes with this
soft rain    and everything renews itself

still at the edges of sleep I see you sometimes
coming down my side of the hill

always coming down the hill my side

I smile to see your green blaze



Roselle Angwin






 

Sunday 10 March 2019

poetry & the sacred: interview with me

Honoured to be the first poet chosen to feature in a new series, offered by Christine Valters Paintner, herself a poet and author of several inspiring books, on the Abbey of the Arts website. The connections between poetry and the sacred (whatever you understand that to mean) are important to me. (Thank you, Christine, for inviting me to participate, and for the questions that created my response.)

You can read the interview, and some of my poems, here, should you wish to.












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