Meadowsweet - Kathleen Jamie

[Larry Robinson]

Meadowsweet
 
Tradition suggests that certain of the Gaelic
women poets were buried face down.
 
So they buries her, and turned home,
a drab psalm
hanging about them like haar*,
 
not knowing the liquid
trickling from her lips
would seek its way down,
 
and that caught in her slowly
unraveling plait of grey hair
were summer seeds:
 
meadowsweet, bastard balm,
tokens of honesty, already
beginning their crawl
 
toward light, so showing her,
when the time came,
how to dig herself out -
 
to surface and greet them,
mouth young, and full again
of dirt ,and spit, and poetry

	- Kathleen Jamie


*cold and damp air: fog
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.sonic.net/pipermail/poetrylovers/attachments/20140827/85bdfb0c/attachment.html>