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.