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 5 May 2011

like a kite on air: Jane Spiro (poem)

Another poem from the new Confluence anthology from the Two Rivers group of poets that I lead down here in Devon. 

I have known Jane Spiro, and her poet husband John Daniel, for a very long time. When I think of Jane, I think of amber – this is an important motif in Jane's novel Nothing I Touch Stands Still, and it seems to me also that Baltic amber conjures the 'essence of Jane': warm and warming, deep, slightly mysterious and with transformative powers.

Jane works with aspects of language and learning at Oxford Brookes, although she lives in Totnes; and she also has an international reputation with regard to her work – emails from her come from Hungary, Mexico and etc. She and John host Weir Poets.

It's superfluous to say that Jane is also a musician...


Violin Valentine

I knew from the first moment
we would find a voice, a way to sing,
you just wood and string
without me, and I a reaching
in space, a breath between notes
without you.

 I knew how the singing
would be, like a kite on air,
a running like a wild child
into sea. 

I wonder now about the mystery
in your wood, if you mourn the forest
where you were, if the wine-brown memory
in your grain holds all the singing
we have done,  all the ways we have
reached for new notes,
all the ways we have found our place.


Jane Spiro

No comments:

Post a Comment

Blog Archive