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Libby Hart-III


I roll you the sun

 

 

Already the day has begun.

I think I will roll you the sun,

for it is too rough and too near,

too bright-eyed for summer here.

 

Its blaze shall brighten your shoulders of yesterday,

release the snow’s white hands that hold you.

I roll you the sun.

 

The memory of you still held within my body.

I roll you the sun.

Songbird. Soulbird. O bird of moonlight.

I roll you the sun.

 

I roll you strive and struggle.

I roll you let-be.

I roll you flicker and rattle.

I roll you mercy.

 

You taught me how to live this way.

How to be prayer-laden.

How to be a flare of sorrow.

 

So I roll you seam and sunder.

And I roll you the sun.

Its burn cradled in one hand.

My yearn in the other.

 

 

 

 

 

Note: This poem’s title derives from a line from ‘World’,

by Carol Ann Duffy from Rapture (Picador, London, 2005).

‘O bird of moonlight’ is from, ‘All the wild animals were

once called deer’, by Brigit Pegeen Kelly (Poems: song and

the orchard, Carcanet Press Ltd, Manchester, 2008).

 

 

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