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

Wednesday 27 April 2011

(poem) everything there is wild and tender

I got a bit tired of the sound of my own voice there. So of course the remedy is more of my own voice! But a prose poem from the forthcoming Bardo (Shearsman May 2011) at least takes us away from the recent reason/intuition dyad, which is, like all dualities, in my view a false schism anyway...


everything there is

I can make you words from mud and rain, from bones and the ache in the blood

words are an easy currency – their shiny sides tessellate neatly on my tongue

but this is not a poem

if it’s a poem you want better to ask the four winds, or get down on your knees on damp earth in ashes and entrails

flailing, your own heart piercing your ribcage like a bird of prey

see the way a poem pushes its head even through tarmac, roots cracking stone; lurks in unlit bus shelters with the stench of piss, the fallout from five-in-the-morning doorways and broken glass

or ask autumn: shedding shoes and clothes and wading out ankle-deep in leaf-fall beneath the sweet chestnuts

with everything there is wild and tender pulsing at the soles of your bare feet



- Roselle Angwin

No comments:

Post a Comment

Blog Archive