am dying too, perhaps come to say
goodbye to these people I never knew.
These losses that never belonged to us
nor the gravediggers. We, Mother, will
remain ants in dry colonies, feeding on grass
in stony graveyards, generations on.
A different time
We invert time
after love fall
asleep as the muezzin calls
the diligent to daybreak prayers.
Night fails. Dawn comes
in strides.
Guinea fowl skirl and caw
into another day
from which we turn.
A curtain billows over us,
like a chimney vents
sweat and our sighs to the world.
Wind, candid with light rain,
falters onto our skins.
Then someone’s 5 p.m. angle-
grinder dredges up our morning.
We straddle time, the bed.
Like starfish, beached
in the sulphur of sunset,
you said.
Leaving
You brought me mangoes, overripe
with a fizz in their yellow flesh:
the tang of home-made ginger beer –
my childhood – you took from your bag,
opening your palms to sunset.
*
The day breaks. We move into
each other, huddle in every known
hollow, and make love one more time.
Then we drink the last of the wine,
our favourite, for breakfast …
Afterwards, I look at your blood
pearling small berries in my hair
drying on my thigh in patches
darker than my skin: like wine
this blood that numbs the cut
of our parting.
February moon: Cape Town
(1993)
1.
The heavy heat today.
At night, voices cool down
but my house holds the sun.
On my table, poems
are coasters: whisky rings
blur and blot the pain.
You’ve left. Seared an ocean.
Left for your small home town
Savannah, Georgia; left me
your one-cup coffee filter,
books of poetry, the aftertaste
of talk: Che Guevara, the IMF
how my modernism limits love.
Now I eat from your plate
hold its blue to shore up my day
and rummage for my particulars –
budget, salary, tax form –
in a bin filled with plastic,
ash, mango skin and condoms.
2.
My land’s an expanse of rubble
and slogans, charters, accords.
Handshakes commit chattering guns
to obscenity and soap operas.
Every day, violence kitsches itself
onto front pages while, caught
in the sublime, the stars twinkle
and our minds race to countless edges.
The radicals drive limousines,
are driven in them, and host dinners
to court capital, promising restitution.
But we’ve seen the sharkskin suit
and the flashing smile, as we become
more and yet more, still, a people
of squatters, building zinc
and cardboard hopes over the words
that scratch at our reformed lives:
heroes bought by your country’s dollars,
by gold and dumdum; heroes leaving
our shacks to rickety revolutions.
3.
We all stumble on favourite poets,
by chance come across their books
scattered in someone’s wake
on worn carpets, or hung from eyehooks.
And within a week, we make them our own.
4.
I dream in poems,
small, short quatrains.
I dream of waking
and writing them down.
I wake and lose them
like leaving
