Black Madonna

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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

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Existence 

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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

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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

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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

Structures of Meaning

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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

Evil is a Facebrick Church in a Modernist Style.

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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.     

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