Meadowsweet, Kathleen Jamie
Meadowsweet
Kathleen Jamie
Tradition suggests that certain of the Gaelic women poets were buried face down.
So they buried 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
unravelling 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.
So they buried 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
unravelling 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.
Published in Jizzen (Picador, 1999)
Image: “Meadowsweet”, Laurie Campbell
Thank you, On a bad day, a good tonic…sent me off to find my ( too few) poetry books,
Gorgeous!
What a beautiful, wise poem