A selection of published poems
Our Sharpeville
I was playing hopscotch on the slate
when miners roared past in lorries,
their arms raised, signals at a crossing,
their chanting foreign and familiar,
like the call and answer of road gangs
across the veld, building hot arteries
from the heart of the Transvaal mine.
I ran to the gate to watch them pass.
And it seemed like a great caravan
moving across the desert to an oasis
I remembered from my Sunday School book:
olive trees, a deep jade pool,
men resting in clusters after a long journey,
the danger of the mission still around them
and night falling, its silver stars just like the ones
you got for remembering your Bible texts.
Then my grandmother called from behind the front door,
her voice a stiff broom over the steps:
‘Come inside; they do things to little girls.’
For it was noon, and there was no jade pool.
Instead, a pool of blood that already had a living name
and grew like a shadow as the day lengthened.
The dead, buried in voices that reached even my gate,
the chanting men on the ambushed trucks,
these were not heroes in my town,
but maulers of children,
doing things that had to remain nameless.
And our Sharpeville was this fearful thing
that might tempt us across the wellswept streets.
If I had turned I would have seen
brocade curtains drawn tightly across sheer net ones,
known there were eyes behind both,
heard the dogs pacing in the locked yard next door.
But, walking backwards, all I felt was shame,
at being a girl, at having been found at the gate,
at having heard my grandmother lie
and at my fear her lie might be true.
Walking backwards, called back,
I returned to the closed rooms, home.
From Familiar Ground and Seasonal Fires
Ground wave
Just below the cottage door
our moraine stairway of lemon trees,
strelitzia quills and oleander shrub
steps to the sea and deeper terraces.
The warming wind, concertina on the slope,
coaxes open the bulbul’s throat,
the figtree’s testicular green globes
and camellia’s white evening flux.
Behind the house we feel
the mountain’s friction against our backs.
Deep fissures are predicted by the almanac,
earth and trees heaving to the shore.
Scorpions come in at night
for cool killings on the flagstone floor.
From Transfer and Seasonal Fires
Mending
In and out, behind, across.
The formal gesture binds the cloth.
The stitchery’s a surgeon’s rhyme,
a Chinese stamp, a pantomime
of print. Then spoor. Then trail of red.
Scabs rise, stigmata from the thread.
A cotton chronicle congealed.
A histogram of welts and weals.
The woman plies her ancient art.
Her needle sutures as it darts,
scoring, scripting, scarring, stitching,
the invisible mending of the heart.
From Transfer and Seasonal Fires
Body parts
may the wrist turn in the wind like a wing
the severed foot tread home ground
the punctured ear hear the thrum of sunbirds
the molten eye see stars in the dark
the faltering lungs quicken windmills
the maimed hand scatter seeds and grain
the heart flood underground springs
pound maize, recognize named cattle
and may the unfixable broken bone
loosened from its hinges
now lying like a wishbone in the veld
pitted by pointillist ants
give us new bearings.
From Terrestrial Things and Seasonal Fires
The head of the household
is a girl of thirteen
and her children are many.
Left-overs, moulting gulls,
wet unweaned sacks
she carries them under her arms
and on her back
though some must walk beside her
bearing their own bones and mash
when not on the floor
in sickness and distress
rolled up in rows
facing the open stall.
Moon and bone-cold stars
navigational spoor
for ambulance, hearse,
the delivery vans
that will fetch and dispatch
the homeless, motherless
unclean and dead
and a girl of thirteen,
children in her arms,
house balanced on her head.
From Terrestrial Things and Seasonal Fires
Kalahari campsite
In the Kalahari night we wonder at stars –
above us so far, so many, all indelible –
we think we’re underneath them, they’re in space and time
beyond us, we’re small and fleshy and they are adamantine
but then immediately it’s raining stars, it’s shooting stars
the whole world is stars and nothing else
desert dunes, red sand, wild cats on killing raids
brown-backed hyena at the fire’s burnt remains
an owl’s alarm call, the pattern of ants across stone
they’re all stars, and we too are stars
we glitter, we rotate, we fall away
we are nothing, there is nothing, but stars
From Seasonal Fires
Histoplasmosis: a guide’s instructions at the cave
If after a few weeks you find yourself coughing,
your chest laced in a corset of steel,
tell your doctor you were here.
Tell him about the bats, their investment in the dark,
their droppings spongy fudge
which you probably tramped on in the cave,
the spores you may have breathed
now inhabiting your lung tissue
taking all your breath
for the growing fungus
inside you.
Don’t panic. There is medication for this
if you reach an informed doctor early enough.
Your airways can be cleared again,
lungs restored to normal size.
But remember, a bat flew into your body
out of a cave. Your body is now a cave.
Your breath is the way in and out of the cave,
its dark entrance the same as
its only exit.
From Other Signs
When people love their land
When people love their land this way
they will do anything.
The land they think, they feel, is theirs
they will do anything to love.
Sing praises, disinter old dialects
secure wells, stretch horizons
transplant ancient olive trees
grow clinging vines and many children.
Sleepless, they will do anything
to keep their love intact, untouchable.
Chanting their own names as
tracts of land, sacred texts
calling out as nameless
the once named dispossessed
they will do anything.
Possessed
they will plant wire, walls, mines
uproot graves where other bones lie
scatter, transport, expel the living
lay siege, lay waste
sow with salt,
blow the land asunder
to extend their claim, their exhausted love
unto the next generation
so no one else can share the land
love it this way, implacably.
From Unleaving
Petrichor, Johannesburg
For WK.
The smell of gunpowder at high noon
warns us of war in the heavens
and by mid-afternoon the cloud putti
start pouting, blow and spit
seductively, childishly, whichever you prefer
(which is the cartoon god with the full cheeks?)
Then a local god, say Soho Eckstein
or a highveld producer with dark jowls
projects light into lightning shards
and the razor-sharp glass
of comic strips and cut-throats
serrates the clouds
While in the same or maybe the next act
sound machinery behind the stage
becomes the stage: drums roll,
boom and batter
Till stones cast from the sky’s slingshot
shatter windscreens, scatter pedestrians,
pile up ersatz diamonds on the pavements
and then rain in a thousand lashes
flays the skin of the city
burns the hail, incinerates roots
and down jacaranda-purpled streets
washes away soil,
blood and evidence, for a minute, an hour,
no one can ever tell how long
Because the resurrecting sun flares back
through the clouds, a quick-change artist
illuminating neon with letter teeth missing,
golden texts no one can interpret
over the city’s buildings and alleys
And from roofs and tar
the familiar smell of rusted dust rises
as the city brushes away again
its burning furious tears.
From Unleaving
Found names
The police named her ‘Precious’,
acid burn on her skin,
long drop toilet, Humansdorp.
A nurse named her ‘Vicky Unknown Monday’,
rubbish dump, Lotus River,
March 2010.
And ‘Moses’, on the banks of the vlei,
‘Valiant’ who was covered in sores.
Never ‘Baby X’, never ‘Baby Y’.
For those who find infants
know they must be named
to properly be saved,
to survive, to be recalled.
We want to remember
Agatha, August, Adamastor
when we tell the stories of
cold, cords, maggots, rags,
the foundlings without cauls.
From Unleaving
Mother country
Sixteen, and her body for three years a vault
in which men deposit small change.
Somebody hit her, bilious bruise on one cheek
so she keeps her head slumped to the side.
Barters her body for food, for drink,
to please the teacher, to pass stale time,
takes it bent over or lying down.
The swelling beneath her school uniform
was seen by cousin, neighbour, mother.
They looked the other way. So it went
with her, when at dawn her waters broke
and she left for bushes a mile from home
carrying plastic bags and rags.
It may be cold waves smashed her rudderless.
May be she hit rock, screamed,
shipwrecked in an unreported storm.
No light on the shore, no life raft in sight.
No survivors but one half-pulsing whelk
ripped from the bottom of the boat.
She returned a day later
bleeding gruel. Not much thinner, not yet.
In the house they turned their eyes from
her empty red pocket, lank hair,
her moon-drained sockets.
From Unleaving
Injury
At the Berlin Rathaus Shöneberg flea market.
All the dolls are bald.
Some heads are porcelain
some straw-stuffed cotton
others rubbery, cold.
A few are blind,
stare across embroidered thread.
There are marble eyes
that cannot close or cry.
If they had souls or skulls
there might be something heraldic
coiled inside, perhaps wings,
the cauls of fallen seraphim.
Some arms are broken off,
stacked in a pile
for locking back if we can,
into torso sockets.
Necks are limp, held by string,
almost new-born floppy
but more like rabbits
hanging on a poacher’s peg.
Most are naked, sexless,
but one wears
a grey nightdress
and that makes it worse.
I watch them tipped
from a hessian sack
onto a long table
in the corner of the market
next to a stack of lightbulbs,
plugs, extension cords,
screws and spanners,
other small rusted tools.
The trader smiles, wants to make a sale.
But I hesitate, wonder to myself
why he buys and sells
spanners, plugs and dolls.
Perhaps he’s not a specialist.
He may be what he seems:
a poor guy in a threadbare belt,
collecting this and that.
From Unleaving
Suddenly
June 2020
Suddenly it’s dark.
Maybe not so suddenly
But like southern winter
Saturated gold one hour,
Ashen grey the next
And one should have known.
In the veld we are still playing
When called in from the dark
By mother, dinner, cold feet.
Stars recognizable
Air crisp on our lips.
All well in our world’s corner
Till we have to leave home
Carrying each other.
Then cross a border alone.
From Unleaving
Lament
The great grey eagle owl
Throws her weightless shawl
Over evening
Fashioning for earth a second ceiling
Under which small sounds
Scuttle and die
While above the owl’s feathers
In open neutral sky
An unnameable smaller bird
Keens. Grieves for its children
or even for us, calls to itself
there being no heaven to call to.
From Unleaving
Song
I closed the windows, drew the blinds,
Put two poems beside your head.
I could not summon your loved Cape robin.
He had long gone to bed.
It might not seem to matter now
Song once heard, words once read.
But still, as vaulted darkness grows
Songs do remain, and what’s been said, said.
From Unleaving
She abjures love
Petals one by one
fall into the grass.
She does,
she does not,
then she does
abjure love.
Even if it happens
to arrive
sheer as muslin,
alarming as
a temple gong,
texting in italics
half-known things
about tongues,
vows and vowels,
she thinks she’ll continue
to put off love
in case it turns into
a unicycle, hang glider,
silent submarine:
that kind of transport.
So she chooses instead
cumulus clouds,
soft rain,
magnolia trees in bloom,
ribbed dunes,
and children in the park
climbing higher than safety allows,
their limbs perfect puzzles
holding together
what has been, is now,
and what is coming soon.
From Unleaving