After

‘A woman giving birth to a child has pain because her time has come; but when her baby is born she forgets the anguish because of her joy that a child is born into the world’. (John 16:21)

If you plant a frangipani branch,
the stub will take root and grow in the
dry dust of memory, singing down
bones of an inevitable death.

Light follows shadow
as a silver fish scythes the sea,
refusing the net.
The sperm finds the egg.

It hurts, breaking apart
to render another human, whole,
but then his small mouth plucks your breast,
no sweeter pleasure, this joy after pain.

One year in

We argue all night, until I ask you to leave.

The next day we walk along the promenade.

I want to view the sea between trees, but

you pull me back, showing me wild jasmine.

We find a bench on the dune.

Below us, a family; a woman

smears sun-cream onto her mate’s face.

A brother and sister build a sandcastle.

You want this for us, you’ve said.

I know I must relinquish the search for a father,

I have lost him and survived,

but still the longing, an ache in the throat.

The sun glares from an aquamarine sky

and waves barrage the beach.

I watch the small girl wrap her legs

around her father’s waist, a limpet, not letting go.

Inheritance

I unravel the skein of lilac mohair
and slip a knot onto the hook,
painstakingly learn from the Youtube clip
how to chain and double crochet.

This wool I weave comes from my grandmother,
a clever woman belittled by her husband.
Working, I sense the solace she found here,
the gashes she knit together, as she stayed and did not leave.

Something delicate forms under my fingers,
like a lacy veil for a sad-eyed bride.
She made me a blanket, once,
strawberry pink, rough, I’ve kept it.

Her losses are not mine. They’re buried
beneath dry pines in Komga * cemetery.
She yellowed, died, in a crumpled bed of rage,
her window opening onto a summer garden, impervious.

But let her passing be a sampler

for the wounded child, watching from the corner.
I link my stitches, swallowing no love
like bile, or poison; craft a small healing.

* small town in the Eastern Cape, SA

From the Lighthouse

The red rail ran rigid around the lighthouse deck.

Below, the sea flurried fierce rocks.

I saw a lone tree, storm survivor, stand severe,

its burnt trunk blackened against the foam.

The guide had warned the group

of danger near the edge,

each adult was to hold the hand of a child.

My son’s grip was a gull’s, longing to fly.

We braced against the cold.

The transparent panes of the huge lamp,

frail-layered in the cloudy light,

belied its powerful night-time pulse,

speaking to ships in the dark.

Threshold

From the bar at the pier’s end

they saw the moon’s pale hands

splay across the sea as if it were a piano,

phrasing waves into a nocturne.

He held his beer glass

steady on the high counter,

as a breeze blew, and her shawl tassels

fluttered against her mouth.

She’d got a raise, she told him.

He was glad, he said.

She watched the night fisherman

step into the shallows, cast his line.

City lights caught

the crescent of the bay,

completing the regretful curve

of ships leaving harbour.

Along the beach

small ordinary fires

warmed the dark.

Free

I lay full-bodied on the beach

and watched my son front the waves.

Cool sky restrained

the sun, a hoop of yellow.

I saw him run, a sandpiper, past

the bathing area, hammocked

by two lifeguard’s poles, towards

fiercer waters, cross-hatched.

Calling him back, my arm stretched

out into a line of warning

I became my father,

Daedalus, afraid for Icarus.

Still, the wild sea mirrored

a naked boy in me, flying.

Frieze

I swim to see sun settling, clear as feeling,
a snake skin helix on the pool floor.

The apartness of light
animates its pattern.

From under my curving arm
a skylight reveals a dream of water, blue.

If I reached down, there would be nothing to take
but the vision satisfies like sleep, or movement.

Record player

I am a turntable,

needle in the groove.

The records of my history

crackle into the air,

motes of dust dancing down memory.

Black vinyl spins me into being –

a hopeless song sung to win a father,

an angry riff ending nowhere.

Tender chords tremble through a remembered house,

ache of forgiveness that came too late.

I am a pile of album covers,

obsolete, stacked in a corner somewhere.

The imprint of a woman gathering poppies on a cardboard sheath,

Schubert’s lament, my mother’s crimson fears.

I set a ring in whirling motion

track a tune to bring back a time

when his love would have made a difference.

The girl merges with the music.

Chapters

Those long afternoons spent alone

in a house swollen with silences,

I burnt with longing –

touching myself as I read ‘The White Hotel’.

Punched by a boy in the gut

when he dared me to kiss him and I did,

hot shame flared.

I lied to the teacher about my tears.

The first time he put his hand there,

under the folds of my skirt,

I stared dumbly into the dark

as his breath burst against my earlobe.

‘Blue Lagoon’ fuzzy on a small TV, 

and children leering like old men

at the couple making love in the water,

I hid my face beneath a prickly blanket.

I wanted what I fought,

we struggled on my cast-iron bed,

breasts exposed and him pushing 

to see what else I would let him do.

I learnt I was here on sufferance. 

Men straddle a world where women yield.

It was years before I could relinquish my body

as a gift, let a lover take what I offered.

Mythical

I am not Icarus

daring with waxen wings to sing a searing sun in flight

I am not Daedalus watching his child destroy a gift

I skim bluer waters beneath the sky

I surf the swells of a more careful sea.

These days are dreams

they barely touch the surface of my knowing,

the nights are clouds scudding across a fierce moon

as a riptide pulls me towards a breakwater.

I am a plant in a pot on your sill

drinking in the light, and growing.

There is safety in speaking.

From this window I see a swallow dart under the eaves,

fear snakes away, the illusions lifting.

20.5

Covet

I found a necklace my mother wore when I was a girl,

small summer fruits hanging from a green glass chain

I fastened the clasp, the past was a pearl,

the years an oyster, secreting pain.

My son touched the cherries, the radiant pear,

he wanted to try it on.

Then I had needed what she wouldn’t share,

the scent of her lingering, bittersweet, strong.

She coiled it in a purse of crimson satin

embroidered with dragons, and soft like a heart.

As arcane as the womanly pattern

I looked for in her, an implacable art.

Owning her treasure, I lifted my child

my future a garden, tentative, wild.

13.5

What the doll saw

Her words were frightened children, small,

hidden, they couldn’t speak.

And that afternoon, there was no one to call.

The girl in the cupboard heard the floorboards squeak.

The porcelain doll saw with her unblinking eyes,

but the mother’s door was shut.

The prim pink roses on the wallpaper disguised

his breath in her ear, as he whispered ‘slut’.

The trees in the garden peeped through her window

and saw how she curled like a shell.

She buried her head under her pillow

but not his words ‘I’ll hurt you if you tell’.

The sun set crooked across the bed

dark came, although she still lived, her story was dead.

Graph

After all the nights you left me in a room with the baby

to sleep elsewhere

and only the wind shifting through the curtains,

to drown out the disconsolate sea.

After following the furniture truck to my own place and

breast-feeding on the floor, too sick to unpack the boxes;

this on the day you put your dog down,

her untreated wound teeming with maggots.

After all the sorrow, and I have not forgotten

how you placed my hand on our son’s head

as he crowned between my legs

and how you held me through the pain.

Your mother died, and you flew to England

to burn her body; we took you to the airport

your boy, a dancing heart and I, a survivor.

I touched your shoulder in the departures hall.

Love is a continuum

it arcs in a trajectory of loss,

we follow it unknowing

towards an indefinite end.

Second chance

I asked him to cut back the tree

and so let in the light.

I heard the axe thud, saw branches

that once bore mulberries fall.

The erythrina below, struggling for so long in shadow

gulped sun like a thirsty child.

Its thorns glinted fierce as secateurs,

needling a flutter of new green leaves, unsteady hearts.

His half-day’s work done,

he dressed in the shed,

took my folded fifty rand note, proud.

He looked up as I shut the gates, waved, was gone.

From the Sea

From the sea

You, poet, alone, immobile, at your keyboard,

the night sighing, a stranger at your back.

You wrestle the anger of the invisible,

lay it down.

Stop picking at the scab of ‘not good enough’,

that makes you mute, look around.

Poets shoal within reach,

also surfacing to breathe.

Together

Astride him, she looked down

as radiant he lay beneath her

and saw that he was growing old,

his black hair brindling grey.

They were divided.

She could not erase doubt

that wrote itself across her face,

an elegy for every time she had been left.

And still he stayed,

pushing up into her

like a tree growing in ground.

Rooted, she clenched around him, and came.

All that she feared

ghosting into the night air, unwrestled demons.

And the feelings a passageway

into the warm dark, remaining.

Umemulo

Night sounds coming and going here like breath,

while the hot dark encompasses me, strange, oblivious.

A Zulu woman’s voice sounds out across the valley,

to key-board notes that seep into consciousness, like rain.

This city’s water is in my bones.

Its earth was not my cradle,

but its sun has scorched stories

across my pale skin, burning a belonging.

Durban, you are a girl turned twenty-one, baring your breasts

for ‘umemulo,’* as others pin money to your beaded hat.

You are her later that day, sheathed in satin,

sipping birthday champagne in a marquee.

In Africa we love each other.

Our frangipani words stay the air with sweetness.

Home is where the heart reaches,

my song for you is starting, listen.

* Coming of Age ceremony (Zulu)

Day

The day, a mango,

sheds its skin

and orange light snakes through the wild ginger leaves.

I want to take your loneliness from you

Let your body dip into mine

as if I were the sea, and you the swimmer.

See how the clouds are dancing.

Seeded with shadows,

they are ready to break open with love.

And the day sings.

In her shoes

We traveled by taxi into a city

caught in a frayed net of light.

I a girl in grown up’s shoes,

ready to take the world, remake it.

My mother was selling me the house she built, for half-price.

Her eyes sad, she told me she was glad for me.

This gift the biggest of so many, while an ocean of morning air

washed through us, tides of years gone by, and not returning.

Time, a child, tugged at my hand,

pulling me back, as still we moved forward,

across the road to the lawyer’s, the green man flashing

and the cars that stopped to let us walk.

17.3.10

Moore Road

There are parallel worlds to this one. Driving,

I view Durban sun rising up the ridge from over the sea,

like a bright garment put on for the day,

and the air already liquid with heat.

Memory is a glittering fish

darting through the shallows.

When I was small, the world was magic, green,

impossibly full of light, longing.

The limit of adulthood lifts at times,

like scales found on the eyes of snakes,

transparent, allowing a vision

of all you thought you’d lost.

Like now, the viewed city gleaming, a rough pearl

asymmetrical, opalescent, what it is,

and not smoothed to fit a mould.

Set it on a silver ring, I’ll wear it.