Hand to Earth by Rebecca Brewin

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AFTER THE STORM

Roaming out into the tail ends, her winds still puffing through cheeks of clouds,

Everywhere blowing in rhythmic force, bowing and lifting as in a trance

And things are scattered up and down; branches, feathers, bulbs only just burst out

She shakes off this trail of debris in her wake; it snakes through the grass,

Mounting in confused muddy piles against the walls and hedges,

Each gust pinching the breath, blustering the ears, as if nothing else mattered

And the turning currents lift moans from the cracked trunk fallen on its side,

Its lichen-covered arms that flexed in all weathers of skies,

Already trodden into the littered meadow, stem by blade, battered by rain

The fields then enter into a lane that is dripping sporadically like a blocked pipe,

A corridor where the last restless spins of her skirts are scurrying through,

A ruffled, scrawny absence where every surface is splattered with soil

She is an outlier, as if from nowhere, her cries like echoes from below;

And images of war follow in succession, each tank, tread, shooting and flag a shock,

These casualties of the storm like refugees, their bodies shattered along a border

Inside the wall of the graveyard the gusts die down to a soft whisper;

The storm has had its sway, now the air lapping like soft waves in a harbour,

It hums of another order, the unsayable prayers of nameless things

When we finally crossed outside after being locked down for months,

A generation of bottled up silenced dreams spilt out over our doorsteps,

The milky promises now ruptured, delivering us to an unknown land

Things were meanwhile pushing up through the crumbling, disturbed ground;

This time leaving its entrails in the gardens of me and you; there are scars,

Scars that calibrate with with the wounds inflicted on our earth

To speak of such things is to craft words from the void of chaos,

To rescue them like drowning hearts that bleed but are seldom heard,

And our voices can be masked and muffled, we now know this too well

Yet between us there is a memory of meaning, a time of unquestioned trust,

And it is in meeting your newly growing edges that I find the truth of my own,

A full circling back round emerging from the storm, as Holy Spirit, as myself

I am learning to love you in this, the shaken and unfinished seams,

The self-made versions of us all unravelling into bodies as yet undefined,

Still to be redrawn, where we walk translucent, falling into each next step

A chapter of revelation, who knows?

At night its small voice whispers to me

This poem has felt stormy to put to the page, circling around images and themes that occur to me in our landscape of turbulence and change. A landscape nudged up against tender shoots of new realisations, often as if they are the same thing, made of the same matter. Somehow it has gathered material along the way, just like the tail end of a storm - its opening line - picking up momentum in wake of the actual event of the UK storm Eunice (in February), then straddling the climatic announcements of Russia's invasion in Ukraine, and now fresh waves of Covid washing back in just as we thought we were escaping. Some times it's like this being a poet, teacher of yoga, or just simply being human, living within a sensitised questioning body; an overload of matetial washes up on your doorstep and it's your job to try and disentangle it into something understandable to the psyche. Like all our lives, more than ever before, here is a work in progess.

Painting - 'Le Coup de Vent' (Gust of Wind) - Jean Baptiste Camille Corot