Mid-cycle

Sunday afternoon in Ackermans, at the Pavilion,
a faux mediaeval castle shopping mall in Durban,
and I veer towards the little girls’ clothes,
though I am long grown and my only child is a son.

Small pink flowers shyly raise their heads
from skinny-hipped denim skirts
ready to blossom
beneath bright ceiling lights.

Instead, I choose Cars Inc. summer pajamas for boys.
Across the T-shirt front, a red Lightning McQueen gleams smugly
under a unbelievably turquoise American sky
(the corporation reaches even into the world of dreams).

Also, I take an orange vest with a bull and rider
bucking their way across its front,
pull it over my four year old’s beloved head,
and watch him run to the till point, his gait, subtle, solid,
the same as his father’s, my ex –
shelves of poetry books keeping him company this Sunday afternoon
in unassailable La Lucia.

My unborn children
crowd my consciousness like ghosts,
tug at my heartstrings with the delicate determined strength
of a baby’s kick in the womb.

The old man, with a belly already distended from the cancer
that would soon kill him, said to his wife,
the mother of his seven children,
‘at least we did not waste your eggs’.

Waiting to pay, in a queue full of strangers
I will never get to know,
I feel the secret spirals of my ovaries pulse,
then a prick of pain, sharp as the Epidural in my back at the birth,
as the ovum, unseeded, is released.

Another possibility
gone.

3.11