Teesta Review: A Journal of Poetry, Volume 2, Number 2. November 2019. ISSN: 2581-7094
Under the door of the present
The wind’s gossip
slips under the door,
drawing in silence,
exhaling a rush of
breath.
At the corner of a
window,
a mountain folds to
haze, hills rise,
petrified swells lines
of soil,
scree and rippled light
imprinted against
a sunned imagination of
clouds.
Below the window
the coming and going
of people, and
sometimes love,
are like the lives
of library books —
often overdue
or just out of arm’s
reach.
He watches the streak
of a buzzard, wings
half-tucked,
as it is catapulted into the brightness
as it is catapulted into the brightness
of a roof, but there is
no thud
of body meeting slate,
of body meeting slate,
just a surge upwards,
a parenthesis of
feathers
defying earth,
gone before he can name
it.
This is the way
we claim the world,
by naming things,
cutting keys for doors
with no locks,
We carry on,
balancing choice,
loving in vain and
drizzling happiness
over ourselves
in the form of children’s voices,
knowing there are no answers
to the big questions,
that are fixed
like granite boulders,
in the form of children’s voices,
knowing there are no answers
to the big questions,
that are fixed
like granite boulders,
pressed into shadow and
valleys.
Outside, the wind is
lifting
the present away —
inventing new
languages,
a passing shadow play
which leaves the
curtains of his room
tangled in the burglar
bars
that
he removed years ago.
Pretoria
Your
pride has softened
to
a whisper
it
lives quietly
even
respectfully
a
rustle of propellant
in
the shell casings
of
old soldier’s dreams
The
past —
a
whisper
trapped
behind glass
part
bone and part powdered blood
sentenced
to museums
the
colour of sad cupboards
The
ranks of jacarandas
wait
for their October orders
issued
in whispers of orange, white and blue
that
always bud to purple
Traffic
and people
press
against history
like
the ocean against land
never
quite reaching
the
houses of the rich
on
the shoreline
There
was once a storm surge
children
cheered
as
the city’s citizens
lost
their moorings
and
their cries
turned
to sea foam
far
from any coast
Most
have forgotten
that
the petrified rivers
of
concrete between the city’s
sandstone
and brick
all
flow from the same source
salted
by the same sweat
and
smoothed by the same fingers
This
morning
the
wind rests on
the
bars of a song of stillness
only
birds and air conditioners
have
escaped
praising
a sun
that
turns the skyline to dust
Smudged
scratch-lines
rise
from the city
tolerance
is bleeding away again
a
seasonal shift
to
whispers of black smoke
that
are seeking out
the
first jacaranda blossoms.