winter coat buttons itself and hugs your heart,
Library books unfurl on tables, stretch
And wait for you to walk past.
Fast winter wind daren’t touch you
But can’t help brush your hair.
You are so perfect
Rivers have built their own bridges,
Knowing that one day you’ll walk across them –
Just to catch your reflection they left a pile of stones for
you to throw.
And the waves carry each stone to the bed, count them,
Look up at you and applaud.
You are so perfect
Traffic lights time themselves days before you arrive
So your stride won’t be broken and the cars can rest
And the world can stop.
A table outside the café lays itself to the waiter’s amazement
Knowing that a man will stop for a coffee,
Knowing that you will walk past at 3.30 p.m.,
And he’d been waiting for you all of his life too.
And if you were the evaporating tears
Then I would be the developing cloud.
There, the sound of rain,
The sound of the between-us-sea,
The shingle shore gently fills our footsteps.
I have searched for you my entire life.
We have stood on opposite shores
Listening to under-sea wails.
No translations as yet, but this.
I lie upon the earth-floor
As a lion might in deep dusk-sun.
Here I hear all the footsteps of the world
Reverberate in the beneath-me-rocks,
Trying to find your first person singular steps,
Trying to find a sentence in a history,
But the needle glints in the golden haystack
Of dawn at the same time a strike of sunlight
Lances its eye. The world is smaller,
The larger my knowledge – still.
Standing, I hear the sun rise,
Not the birds of morning nor the cock crowing.
The cars coughing the footsteps of early workers
Muffled in the red dust trudging through sleepless mystery
But I hear the actual sun rising.
And as a sea can turn to dust before the eyes
I hear you through the sand storm – the needle!
Slow running from the red terror
Arms wide to protect yourself or welcome me,
Feet dragging through sand and globules of blood
Burning in the heatwave wiping hot sand from your face,
Men with guns on the horizon far behind you,
The past tense threatening your presence.
I hear a concert of AK47s click, as thousands
Reload. The heat is tremendous – you have a radio.
But the sound of sand lifting from the ground
In the grip of the wind, disturbs – you understand what is
happening,
Not through sight but through the sounds.
I could almost hear you, your breathing
As you gave birth again and another sister
Opened her eyes. Her wet face of sand.
In the drawing of this drama, the mist of mystery
Rising above the airwaves and heatwaves
We have scattered around the world,
Revolutions between us. Implosions of conscience.
Corrupting earthquakes have split our family – between us
Swallows migrate above the Atlantic Ocean
Pixellating the sky on tidal waves of heat
With such damnable ease.
And amongst the purple rain and stormy airwaves
Radio waves like flocks of swallows or the flamingos of
Lake Tana
That seem to fly out from the reflecting solar wind
Land upon both of us with feather-wing ease,
Bringing my world to yours and your world to mine.
And now that we meet,
The sand storm lays low.
Like a pride of lions
After the chase,
The sun rises, its golden mane shakes.
You tell me, ‘I heard a poem on the World Service,’
And I finally, face to face, get to tell you
It was me
Tuning
