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
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.
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.
