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

Friday 6 January 2017

Lost Species poem 13: Chris Waters

The latest poet in this series is Chris Waters. The natural world is his frequent subject and this poem, like many of his, has a distinctive style and loses nothing to its brevity.


In the Midst of the Sixth Great Extinction
 

All of John Clare’s birds – Fern-Owl and Starnel,
Chiffchaff, Corncrake, Pettichap, Pewit,
Bumbarrell, Snipe, Quail – all of them,
overnight, in moonshadow, while elsewhere
we lay dreaming, upped, just upped, took wing
from his poems, leaving not an echo
or a fallen feather on their page, leaving
redacted lines like a stripped winter hedge
holed with black spaces, with windswept nests
where nothing now glabbered or chelped.


© Chris Waters



https://www.amazon.co.uk/Christopher-Waters/e/B003JB2CIK 











1 comment:

  1. Beautiful. I love John Clare's poems - they say so much in such a simple way.

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