Poem
Kathleen Jamie
Meadowsweet
Meadowsweet
Meadowsweet
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.
© 1999, Kathleen Jamie
From: Jizzen
Publisher: Picador, London
Published with kind permission of the author and Picador (http://www.picador.com/).
From: Jizzen
Publisher: Picador, London
Kathleen Jamie
(Scotland, 1962)
Kathleen Jamie is a leading figure in a generation of distinguished Scottish poets that also includes Don Paterson, Robert Crawford, John Burnside, Roddy Lumsden and Jackie Kay. She was born in Renfrewshire, Scotland in 1962, and grew up in Edinburgh, where she studied philosophy at Edinburgh University. Her poetry career got off to an early start when she received an Eric Gregory Award (for...
Poems
Poems of Kathleen Jamie
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Meadowsweet
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.
From: Jizzen
Published with kind permission of the author and Picador (http://www.picador.com/).
Meadowsweet
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