I re-read Alice Oswald’s poem, Hymn to Iris, yesterday. I first encountered it in her 2005 collection Woods etc. I recalled it as a poem of fatalistic despair. But reading it again this week, in these days dominated by an electron-microscope image of a flower with blood-red petals, I see it now as a poem of hope, offering the possibility of rebirth and rebuilding.

 

Quick moving goddess of the rainbow
You whose being is only an afterglow of a passing-through
Put your hands
Put your heaven-taken shape down
On the ground. Now. Anywhere
Like a bent- down bough of nothing
A bridge built out of the linked cells of thin air
And let there be instantly in its underlight –
At street corners, on swings, out of car windows –
A three-moment blessing for all bridges
May impossible rifts be often delicately crossed
By bridges of two thrown ropes or one dropped plank
May the unfixed forms of water be warily leaned over
On flexible high bridges, huge iron sketches of the mathematics of strain
And bridges of see-through stone, the living-space of drips and echoes
May two fields be bridged by a stile
And two hearts by the tilting footbridge of a glance
And may I often wake on the broken bridge of a word,
Like in the wind the trace of a web. Tethered to nothing

Alice Oswald – Hymn to Iris

Picture of River Dee near Llangollen ©Bobby Seal