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  • Between Geology and Air
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Between Geology and Air

Gerrie Fellows

Question and answer after Ingrid Calame

How can we live
as if in a child’s painting:
                           earth   sky
what is human between them

how can we live
between sky and earth
and not be compressed

the air in the alveoli
                          dense as if water
were flowing through us

Under our footsteps:
                  graffiti   bones
                  the fossil layers
                  the mineral chains

attach us by lightsome metals
              mined to make
                  our miracles

                  Earth pushes up
through our footsoles
                  air spins us
in its thinning spheres
                  time flies through us


Gerrie Fellows

From Uncommon Place (Shearsman Books, 2019)

Reproduced by permission of the poet.

Tags:

nature time

About this poem

This poem was included in Best Scottish Poems 2019. Best Scottish Poems is an online publication, consisting of 20 poems chosen by a different editor each year, with comments by the editor and poets. It provides a personal overview of a year of Scottish poetry. The editor in 2019 was Roseanne Watt.

Editor’s note:

The first lines of these poems have been returning to me a lot lately, given the recent abundance of children’s rainbow paintings in the windows of our street. They make a fine companion to walk with on those pre-scheduled trips to the outside. I love the way this poem moves so deftly between lightness and density; it makes me want to grasp its meanings and resonances while I can, just in case they might fade or sink into that between-space of the white page they occupy.

Author’s note:

‘Between Geology and Air’ was written in response to an exhibition at the Fruitmarket Gallery by Ingrid Calame, an artist who has mapped the stained and cracked surfaces of pavements, car parks and concrete river banks. I’d had a powerful sense of a radical change of viewpoint which felt earth-orientated and which connected with my own feelings of walking layers of ground. Reading the poem now, I’m aware also of its focus on the lungs, breath which connects us to air as our feet connect us to earth.

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Best Scottish Poems 2019

edited by Roseanne Watt
Find out more

Gerrie Fellowsb.1954

Gerrie Fellows was born in New Zealand but has lived and worked in Scotland for thirty years, as a creative writing tutor, writer-in-residence and most recently as a mentor to new poets through the Clydebuilt Mentoring programme.
More about Gerrie Fellows

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