Hymn to Iris

Alice Oswald

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 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