Tiny white moths in the bracken and heather flit up like delicate, anxious thoughts. You ask if I’m as well as I seem, and I tell you about the wild-tiger butterfly, low along the bedding plants and irrigated dust. I want to make this picture for you to speculate to and from – to have been so much in the desert, and still surrounded by colour. I map my hyper-vigilant body apportioned between the sand and hibiscus, as though in dialogue. As though the sand were the unconscious of trees.
A mountain apollo, not to be held in cupped hands
but separate from yourself, like a psalter split in two
and sold into different collections. To read one half
is to call to the other, to have it answer
So much has been given to the consideration of blue. These harebells, for example. Berger says blue is both adorning and modest, the robe of the Madonna. That through the sway of these conflicting ideals, in blue we find the erotic. Does this allude to the eternal paradox of mother as virgin? Were the two women given the same name in that story to grant our fantasy of the maternal body, as well as its human urgency? I divide the colours of my desire against the sedge and gritstone, not for you to acquire or reject, but in awe of this fragmented light, without hope of resolution.
‘The Hathersage Road’ appears in Angelina D’Roza’s second full-length collection The Blue Hour. A beautifully produced hardback, it is available now from Longbarrow Press; you can order the book securely by clicking on the relevant PayPal button below.
The Blue Hour: £13
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More than 60 previous Featured Poems can be accessed via this index (many of these pages also contain audio recordings and short films).
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