Swimming lessons - 150308

Swimming lessons

Forceful in their quietness
As sudden as a gust of wind in the quick of night
The moths flutter up from the hedge-leaves
Hundreds of them
Not gaudy like dragonflies
but brown,
uniform.

She thinks that maybe
There wings are coated with poison
Like beautiful oleander flowers,
Like lies,
That do harm with seeming sweetness.

The women placed around the pool
watching their children learn to swim
Talk about the storm the night before
The red-head speaks of the lightning conductor
That caught fire
She saw it from her bedroom window
‘Flames shot from it!’
She says,
As if she thinks they shouldn’t have.

The grandmother compares rain measurements
In Berea, in Amanzimtoti
‘No rain fell in Durban North’
She says with some surprise,
As if she thinks it should have.

The one who would be a poet
Describes her dog
How it hid from the thunder under her son’s bed,
Where she too took shelter
It muzzle resting in her hand
- but they are not listening.
And her voice is softer than darkness.

She remembers the Palauen cave she read of in the newspaper
Filled with the skeletons
Of small humans, ‘hobbits’
- the sand made of ground human bone.

The silence of the dead
jangles across the centuries,
flashes light onto things left undone.

Her heart pulses in her throat
Like a separate animal,
Like her son’s small splash-kicks
Across the water

Bringing himself
Towards her,
Sitting there,

Still living.

150308