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.