Bred by thunder
A rainbow rising out the oil slick
The golden woman
Made flesh
Pupils dilating in Cairo
Fleet footed
At the continent’s southern tip
She made heaven open
Singing joy
Singing bliss
Transforming pain into all of
This
When the damn thing breaks
She sings
And me, on the grass, I listen
On the grass and the leaves and the coal
Drawing orange light from the Power Source
The True Warmth within
This is not snake oil
This is Kundalini
A rising and release
Motion questing for expression that this language can not hold
This ones for a deeper plane
A higher place
Bathed in your love
I can only find it in a disjointed and glorious
Re-Assemblage
Light Breath Dance Be
Francis Bebey meets Dawn Chorus
The forest is waiting for you, my child
Singing in all our languages
Known and Unknown
Named and Unnamed
Solid Melting
The Groundless Ground
Found Her
A Madonna, Black
In the playground
Next to
The church ground
In between
The chicken shop
And the housing estate
She guarded the sacred water
Which we sniffed
Did not drink
Waiting on health & safety
Knowing that She
Enters us pilgrims
Regardless
Once the road has disappeared
Once the path is all done
We are children
Waiting for elders
With true hunter gatherer souls
Though Our Fathers
Hold us tight
In patriarchal embrace
Leaving us rooted
Without nourishment
Only extraction
Of the wonderful spirit
In all its messy glory
That is our birth right
Here I practice
Maximum foraging returns
Riding house sits and lucky breaks
Caught in the gap between
Native & Settler
There is no sense to be made
In all of this
I exist regardless
I exist regardless
Remember my names
Don’t let
The pointless thoughts
The busyness
Overwhelm
Her still and sacred heart
You, child of the mountain and the sea
Sang songs with whales
Tossed on the curve of the bay
Sitting sweetly at the table
When your hair wouldn’t grow
I always wanted
To be there for you
A steady, playful presence
When I fail
It’s not that my love for you
Is in doubt
But because the world’s noise intruded
Seeping corrosive syrup into the safe place we made
Leaving us in pieces, divided and grief stricken
Our memories disrupted
In bodies, depleted and un-storied
When we are there
I hold you still
Beyond words and noise and silence and things
Ocean carries our secret
Criss crossing the jagged breaks
Coming home on a deep swell
A strong current
A true call
So remember my names
As a key remembers a lock
Remember my names
Knock knock knock
The lonely sea came
Carried by the wind
To the warm red center
1000 leagues from shore
Dust blowing on the crests of her cold waves
I sat, super still
Watching ice tipped fingers searching
Through the branches and leaves of my treehouse
Inside, I was afraid
But ready
To be enclosed and swept away
My treehouse becoming boat
The leaves a billowing sail
The branches steady oars
Rustle rustle
Tap tap
Sail away
And don’t look back
I began to love
The glitter and colour
Of the Anthropocene’s layer
Saw great beauty reflected
In future eyes gazing
On all of this
Wasteful Folly, stripped of Meaning
Re-made
Indifferently, lovingly
Absorbed.
As we are, inevitably
Ashes to ashes
Dust to dust
Plastic makes beautiful geology
Long after this has passed
Head arches
Inflating balloon-style
As if I
Were
About to
Lift off
Propelled by:
Righteous anger,
And Hot Air.
There in the stratosphere
Contemplation of
The Structure of Meaning
Embodied in Me
At this time
In this place
Once I reach Outer Space
I will let genetic legacies fly
Joyously admixing
Till no traces
Are left
To harden
When I land on earth
Swallowed by the ocean
I will be soft hewn
Malleable and porous
I will be True Love
Dispersing into foam on the waves
I will break on the shore
Droplets of salt water
Percolating into sand
Nothing left to hold
Nothing left to be
I am no one
A thin spirit
Wandering the Land at its source
Shape-shifting to become
The peaks and valleys
Of the everyday
The banality of Evil
All around me
Sits, hideous
Contemplating the world from a park bench
Evil is a face brick church built
In a modernist style
Signalling its permanence
As a landmark on the highway, heading home
I struggle to keep pace
Wraith-child match girl
Lighting flames in the wind
The terrible book of the past
Written around, and on, and through me
Jaws of bone and stone
Open to offer a route
Elsewhere
Standing at the gate
Pink light of dawn
Cold hands of morning
Slipping into the folds
Of a warmer place,
A language learnt
A past unravelled
Commentary
I wrote this poem in response to Jane Alexander’s sculpture ‘The Butcher Boys’, currently part of the permanent collection at the South African National Gallery. It depicts the brutal and dehumanising forces of apartheid. It is unsettling and haunting. It is also the subject of the tourist’s gaze. A work to be photographed with by visitors to the gallery pulling amusing poses. This is the way of things. Alexander made the work in the 1980’s, a time when the violence of the state, and the response of the people was exploding in South Africa. I remember this time as my childhood years in Johannesburg. Sun-lit and ordinary. Lying on hot bricks, wet from the pool. The tanks rolling down the quiet suburban streets to quell uprisings in the neighbouring township. The barbed wire going up around our primary school. Bombing my bike as fast at it could go around the twisted pedestrian bridge that spanned the highway. Horror on the outskirts of an insulated suburbia that was participating either through active collusion or a studied refusal to notice. Being in South Africa over the last few weeks, the visceral sense of a great evil that made the present is something that I feel everywhere. Life goes on, as it should, but this poem bubbled up in response to the insidious ways in which evil sits with us. In my practice I think about what it means to live with the after-effects of evil. What the balance is between knowing the evil of the past, seeing how it operates in the present, and also being sufficiently free of it to be able to respond to what is right now. It is the tension between knowing what made us, and releasing its stranglehold without the denial and amnesia that can characterise a too-hasty release of the pain story. Working through identifying and releasing pain stories in the West of the Wheel, I am aware that these stories are woven into the fabric of national narratives, kaleidoscopically. Poems bubble up in dawn meditation. The cacophony of the dawn chorus. My tired eyes snap open.
Briefly, I am awake.
Got caught up in the game Riding trains around a sunset city a perpetual indigo twilight a heatwave headphones on an outmoded technology Still, reliably able to get lost in …. All of that sweet dream You are something else … Continue reading
