Frog Medicine 2 at Samhain (poem)

             Frog Medicine 2 at Samhain

                    ‘Nothing is what it appears to be’, ‘Frog’, Philip Carr-Gomm

You, tiny red swimmer

taking refuge from the storm

in the waterbowl this morning

you, limbs asplay

you, spirit of the rain

reminding me of something quiet

something I can’t quite grasp

under the gale’s lash

under the whipped boughs

trees freed from their raiment of leaves

wind almost thick enough

to smell     to taste

almost a colour

colour denoting absence

*

to be possessed by absence

to know you possess

nothing

you can call your own

*

floodwater excoriating the thin strip

of red earth crossing the county

east to west

the earth’s one skin less

the earth’s one harvest less

(our childhood’s cornfields

high as our waists

the blaze of corn poppies

our childhood reverberating

in another unvisitable continent)

*

to possess, a fable

to be possessed, a fable

*

taking refuge in the mutable –

element of water (you, red swimmer

spirit of the rain), element of earth –

frog with your tiny red feet

frog in the waterbowl

frog clambering up over rocks

frog rising up in the well

here in deep shade

here in the lee of the gale

here where the moment begins

taking refuge

again and again

spirit of rain

at the earth’s dark turning

time of the Crone

Samhain

© Roselle Angwin 2019