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

Monday 21 December 2020

poem for the winter solstice 2020



In the Cave of the Heart

If the year hadn’t been this dark,
if our usual state of uncertainty
hadn’t triumphed again so firmly
as the dark will again, if briefly,
before our journey back, if those
two planets, one the epitome
of contraction and the other expansion,
had not met in extraordinary intimacy
as they haven’t since 1623, and I hadn’t
been reminded that John Donne wrote
then that ‘no man is an island’; if these
hadn’t happened I might have forgotten
that in the cave of the heart there are
no strangers. We all long for the same
things: some rest, some hope, a little
love, the faith that the earth will
continue her path round the sun,
and we with her; that the light
will return, that spring will come.


Roselle Angwin

 

 

 

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