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.
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.
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
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)
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.
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
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.
