Longing for St Francis

It was a song title
for my small guitar playing hands in December
a seasonal fire of the mind ignites
that longing, years later
far beyond reckoning, adult reasoning
logic abandons, late in the night
certain stoic images remain solidified
tide gathering towards our rock pool house, later afternoon
the morning light shattering the sea in diamonds
Tropitone oil for dark skin leaking onto towels,
 imprinted permanently with the holiday scent

Christmas cake sitting in the heat, signature of that house
Humansdorp Home Industry shop, dusty ferns, the quiet cashier
the delight of choosing homemade shortbread with that small line of pink icing
we buys bagfuls, the parents buy rusks
picnics up the Kromme river, jumping off the boat,
and delights of vetkoek with cheese and jam,
all these moments, fragranced, stayed


The view of that bay,
 the boats lit at night like upside down stars on the water
but one best beloved scent alludes me
it abandoned me when we left that place
I wake up sweating, confused, crying
whispering to myself
I have forgotten the smell of fynbos.

the execution of art

as myth
as order
as space
as power
as shadow
as shape
as chance
as workshop
as mind
as island
as survival
as oblivion
as imagination
as identity
as the home of the wreckless

light crying

Not the expected deluge
I try for tears, they do not come
just like a young rain smell
something stirs to remind,
a shadow of thought, an image slips behind the door
light combines with sadness, unseen, subtle
creating a quiet grief
humid, hot, foliaged in overgrown green grass
 the forgotten fields of childhood.

Home

A mental sanctuary
a repository of memory
an archive of  identity
an emotional value beyond the well positioned
well loved art pieces, the cushions

Battle

When the gates of illusion fall
they do not shake me,
the pillars of conformity collapsed, uniform
I stand firm in the settling dust
armies of the norm, the status quo, the system
are marching towards my stronghold, overpowering
I do not shake, I watching the merging against my liberty, unmoved
the wind rises in my favour
dream ships called from the east mobilise
I am not alone, the power is equaled,
opposition of this collective greed
finally defeated as the rising of moon dictates a new dawn

Shade

low breathing dogs lying in the late light
leaves signal the breeze
dappled images
she lies in the grass, eyes closed
protected from the sweating sun

History circles

The linear appearance, deceptive
some of us are reborn children with other distant memories
she knows places, faces from an unknown past
she dresses dolls in the clothes  I once picked out years ago, exact in matching

Cobweb Thoughts

hanging from the chapters of my life
the dust of history makes me unsettled
hanging from the rooms of my memory
the heart takes a broom, needing clarity
these cobwebs cloud the view, the past is obscured.

Hope

Sometimes hope must be reborn

At a tired two o' clock in the morning

Hope must be forced into the dark room

Like a small spluttering candle struggling to breath

Sobbing words are forgiven

At this eye rubbing time

The stomach acid feeling of surrender

Inevitable, showing how we are inextricably linked we are

Hope must be pulled from the deepest body part

a brutal caesarean bringing new life

This private mourning

Before the morning

Is ours alone to hold with new cries

Navigation

My navigation of the ship of destiny
is faulty, I lose focus in the mist
I consult inefficient maps
and forget guiding constellations at night
I turn against the strong winds
and return to a safe place for a while.

Earth Magnetics

I was eight, maybe seven
the first time I held the fork shaped stick
an ability to find underground water source is rare
a handful have the gift
they feel the fork shaped stick bend,
even against equal and opposite force
I have felt the pull of the earth
under a certain tree, before a rain storm
I walk shaking with bent concentration,
wishing for the gift of finding water,
Finding a deep life source
desperate in the dry season,
cattle putting hopes on my young arms

Mince Pies

The inflammation of my psyche
is momentarily undone by a reminder
the uncomfortable shiftings of the world
disappear for a moment, bent over the kitchen table
with a plate of mince pies, Christmas signals
indicators of innocence
calm inducers

grass cutting

the smell of the lawnmower petrol
even before the grass is being cut
and my sense of present falls directly into a confused past
lawns mowed in December, in March, different lawns
wheezing after the grass has been cut
spanning years of my life in so many houses,
this one smell has joined forces to bring them together
In a short clean smelling light green line of stripes

sleepthoughts

my mind has found a footpath
a walk through foliage
through mud drenched ground
thick with remembering
then open, dried and clear
with a broader view
sunlit, quiet, free
undisturbed.

Night War

The internal war
of those years, is not over
I wake at two in the morning
reminded by fear
panicked by the confusion of time deception
I bring to life my demons
I talk to them, I breathe with them
I live with them beside me at that time of night.

the soul seeker

the night brings a searcher
wading between a resilient and a restless soul
weighing up the attributes
strength versus wandering

Yesterday

Yesterday will stay

In all my senses

Shaking, my body ceases to release

The grief

It repeats the day over 

Every time I wake in the night

I see the whole day unfold with a blinding sickening certainty 

The adrenaline pulsing through my body, liquid cocaine

Each minute gaining hourly gravity

Waiting, waiting for the total darkness to ease into dawn

That never ending night

The scream I could not not know, dog or child

They sounded the same 

Burial

We killed you to save a life
a small protective life
it was a fight to the death
intervened by a human and a whip
you stood, half knowing half confused
from behind the electric fence border, maligned by fear
my child sang to you about kindness
I fed you meat, wept for your last night
waiting behind the fence you once patrolled
one shot and you collapsed, heavy in death as in life
the small quiet burial in the poplar forest
followed by a rain storm in the evening
the wind sang you away.

Alice

you are the protective shadow behind my children
asking little, keeping away lonliness and snakes
they call you 'our best pal'
fiercely beloved among the canines

we drive home in oppressive heat
empty, the house tricks me into hearing your footsteps
we walk through the rooms, senseless,
lonely, lost
we fall asleep midday
waking up confused, sweating
I bake cupcakes in a dreamstate,
forgetting to measure ingredients
my daughter sits in front of the fan
counting down until we can call the hospital for news
we will you back to life across the mountain to where you lie
bleeding, shaking, wounded
we hope that the sheer force of our collective grief
and love, can bring you back to your home.

Home Drawn

The time inevitably comes
When the view is too green
Too close, too covered
Too moist
I pack bags and drive on autopilot
Turning right onto the dirt road
Telling the girls,
Open your windows
Seat belts off
The air joins our visible relief sigh
The dry dust red earth clouds behind the car
We wave goodbye to traffic
And sink back into familiar bare trees
Panting dirty dogs
A living house, pictures drawn on the walls
As effortless as drinking cool water
We settle with the dust.

post rain

what I miss about that land
and will always miss about that land
the vast all or nothing natural habitat
is, that the land mirrors my character intensely
I meet myself, crudely, openly
in the rainswept expanses of back to back horizons
the collective force of sensory stimulus
stamping approval on my wayward solitary soul

Sunday Afternoon Visits

The stigmatized walls smell too clean

Wandering half alive girls with haunted sunk in eyes 

There is something sinister, unspoken, hanging from the high ceilings

A collective wish to die binds these girls together

Starvation, permanent pajama's, a denial of existing

Life becomes a twisted game of avoiding meals

I sit in the ward with you, numb, fighting this grief, this horror

I drive home with mom

And curl up in my room

Willing this nightmare away, thinking of childhood

Running through the sprinkler

Chasing ducks on the farm

When you were my understandable sister

Not this ghost victim of disappearing.

The Hunted Heart

The blood may stain the ground, temporarily
Dry cracked bones litter a path through the winter grass
Clay cracked, the surface of a murder
The theft of feeling was silent, brutal, decided
A self governed life was torn open
Taken, leaving subtitutes of spirit and name

Rock Pool House

Better to visit at low tide,
Shivering
From the confluence of Atlantic and Indian Ocean breeze
We take the same route across the rocks each time
Scrambling up to the tilting rock
Surveying the view, squinting in the sparkle sea light
We have mapped out our territory in our minds
The rock pool with a few fish, our kitchen
A longer narrow rock binds the house as passage
He sits high on the tilted 'lounge'
Looking out over the the bay
We hold out sand and small pebbles
For his dinner.

Fleeting

Fresh farm mornings
flowers, fragrant French croissants
Friday's, the fireworks at New Year's
forgiveness
fiery sunsets across the ocean
fear relieving embraces.

Border Control

We crossed from no man's land
leaving the scratched bareness of Bostwana
we were hungry for the clean skyline of your country
we waited, we walked, and we were stopped just before the gate
signalling the entry, the road where we can stop anywhere, alone
we didn't cross that night, as the careless stars overtook the winter sky
dignity absented and left space for the demons, that night
our precarious dreams fell apart that night.

Humanity

The state of humanity
is not gratuitous emotion
it is self participation,
it is the art of getting up every day,
it is in carrying on, carrying the growths of pain
taking the next step, telling the story, placeless.

Hail

Tension up in the air
skies are water retaining
angry
quiet,
the hail storm is on the horizon

Water

The average household living standard is a veneer
it causes a mental inflammation, spreading, taking for granted
poverty is not a fluid construction,
it is lack of food
it is a thirsty child, hoarse throated, without water
it is the line crossed from having survival fundamentals
to not having survival fundamentals.

Land

It brutally mirrors us
anger spurts lava
water dissipates, contrary
a lone animal cry in the dark hours
fear cries out from falling rocks
desperate baby cries as trees bleed and crack
haunting greed, fire gathers, takes fields, licks dry and fertile ground.

Dream Defense

reality becomes a white dusty road
I am driving in the afternoon fading light
watching the road become wider
the eye burning dry air is quietly welcoming me back

Lens

Life is a bubble
filtered by opinion
scratched by betrayal
like jackal call before dawn
diluted by the drops of lemon juice
faded by the drumming of time

Grey Day

The winter thinker
Wood gatherer
Fire maker
Flame watcher
Moves into the warmth of day dream

theft

You cast shadows where we only saw shafts of light
Innocence was rewritten to accommodate you
Your darkness was strong enough to shatter glass blown joy formations

Child

every change, every flicker in your eyes
runs my emotional day like a weather forecast
you reflect in me uncertainty
I doubt my mothering capability
when you stare through me with all consuming,
life comprehending eyes

Waking

A vitamin dificient mind
A departure lounge delayed wait
An elevated view
Flickers of remembering before the daylight.

familiars

the consistency of light
fading after the morning glare
subtle against the awakened grass
the pressure of light on blank sand
has slowly moved away from my shipwrecked mind.

bone digger

the present is empty
swallowed by the shadows of the backlands
dry as a dust bone scattered veld
Star speckled dreamscapes remain.

Restitution

After that time,
That forbidden in conversations
Carpet pulled over the cracks time
The time even my war torn dreams refuse to revisit,
I stayed, and made life small, simple, and beautiful.

I kept fresh flowers next to my bed
I watered the lawn and sat by the rippling fishpond
And like the concentric circles of the calmly ambling fish
I felt pulled back into a rythmn I could understand,
And I survived.

Atlantic

This side of the ocean

Will now be

What I see

In my dream sea

The chill fever sleepless nights

Seeing an ocean of barnacle infested, swollen tonsils

Drowning in this health consuming water

The nights are endless

This place has infected my subconscious

Shrinking clarity and reality

Stripping the mind of sunshine vitamins.

Twenty Years of Sadness

Between the limits of daily routine
The parking spaces of consciousness, dotted lines
Signifying allotted boundaries between then and now
Mental indigestion fails to metabolize the memories
Imagination stoops, bends,
Attempts to recover the broken mind.

Heartbeat

A beating drum

A beating heart

Darkness outside

The pulse beats far, far away from my body

This pulse finds levity with the red earth

This pulse moves with the breath of cattle

With the heat steamed breath from cow to calf

in the kraal,

cloud breath bubble against the Highveld winter

beating as steady as a well practiced drummer

finding rhyme,  finding meaning.

Reflection

Depending on the clarity of the water
the faces can be either ours or theirs
the murky parts leave the question lingering

Seasonal

I long for Roodekranz
Where the icy morning
Breathes the season with the moisture on the ground
The bare branches
The scent of disappearing plant in cold  quiet

My African Dream

I have lived in Africa all but 18 months of my life.  Like Isak Dinesen, I too have had a farm in Africa.  and I know that it is indeed worthy of a dream to be part of this living, breathing continent, intense, uninhibited, and as lawless as some other continents seem to be orderly.

In Africa you can lose time, easily.  You can lose a lot.  I think loss and time are paramount to this piece.  Because time and loss both take on a meaning no dictionary can define.


In Africa you lose time getting anywhere.  There is no infrastructure, there are bad roads, power cuts, lack of service.  African time has different perception to the European daily routine. Things happen if and when they can.  People take days getting to a place, if a taxi or car arrives for them pending weather, money, strikes, gunfire.  People walk slowly making a day into what I would want to GET DONE in two hours.  Time takes a much more holistic approach, but you can lose hours stuck in bad road works or inefficient internal affair.

But,

In Africa, you gain time.  you gain space, you gain the ability to follow in the way people accept queues and talk, cook, knit sit and just let it be.  You gain the time of watching spaces before the onslaught of the schedule.  you get the idea of people who wait all for the possibility of a lift into town to buy something.  If not, they walk back for an hour, and go home, and try again tomorrow.  If a bus breaks down, you stand around, and talk.  Not on your phone.  Because these things happen.

In Africa, loss is part of the bloodline.  This is a continent where is is never enough, where there is a reality of starvation, slavery, rape, AIDS, disease, poverty.  It is an accepted part of the path from birth to death that there will be death, there will be some malignant or subtle form of abuse, of deprivation.  The few who escape this are the lottery winners.  There is a persistence of living, a seeming miracle of survival on this continent which leaves myself and many other in disbelieving reverence.

Loss comes.  It comes to every family at some point.  And one sees this void and pain and humiliation daily in the media, and in environmental context.  After a while we call ourselves immune armed with never feel safe, hijack training, alarms, fight or flight syndrome burning and toxically smouldering under the skin, prevalent in the nervous system, masking in the form of anxiety and stress related heath compromisers.

We become so immune and defence ridden that we think are resilient to most crimes.  If the vein of crime comes directly into you home, assaults you, your children, with threat of death, maybe not so much.  But we can handle the general loss of Africa.

I tried to feel that way.  Not because I am thick skinned and arrogant.  On the contrary, I sensorially  carry everything I see and come into contact with, and made a decision in the interests of my family to keep strong boundaries, in the event of attempting to save and help anyone.  I also had some awful ungrateful encounters which people who had an unwarranted entitlement with regards to the rest of their lives.  So I set up my guard at the fortress of Africa.

And then, with no notice, my guards let their weapons down.  Because loss occurs, brutality, occurs, as does injustice.  But when it hits someone you know, who never asked you for anything; you saw a young mother working hard to keep her job with her own baby.  She lost that baby.  He drowned in a basket of water because she was busy trying to keep her job.  I knew this  little boy.  My children knew and loved this little boy.  And by some predetermined tragic equation he died suddenly right next to us.

I tried to be stoic, and strong and distant.  But I knew this child.  And I know the mother.  I know she was tired and overworked.  I know she tried her best.

I saw her the day after her child died.  She had gone to identify the body.  She stood in the driveway watching my girls ride their bikes, in her purple corduroy jacket, like so many evenings before.  This time she was vacant, drinking in the two living children with her whole body.  She stood there, all alone, at the edge of the driveway, watching.  I lost my distance.  In that moment I became her mourning, and all the mourning of the ones left behind after loss.  I held her and spoke to her.  The night crept closer.  In this cold winter driveway of sadness I realised that we are all connected when deep emotions are true and expressed.  Loss is there, alive, and all we can do give as much love and understanding and warmth and goodness so that the human condition, especially in Africa, can share in that unity.  It is a continent based on communal consciousness.  We can only hope to give more understanding and open armed caring.  For me it started in a driveway in the cold, holding onto a lady who was at that moment, and will remain, and is, a fellow mother, grieving loss.

Fire burnt mind

When I look towards to the west
I turn my head, close  my eyes
I cannot look towards that enchanted place
Like a mind cleanse I forget that tucked away house
At the end of a long dirt road
Where humanity disappears
And baboon calls echo in the night
Where stars still light the night
I turn my head back to the centre
Leaving behind, scorching those happy seductive images

Urban Catalyst

superlatives soar from the steaming concrete
energies collide like breathing organs
pumping exhaust fume dreams
thoughts cross over the pedestrian lines
I run from the masses, leaving brutal baggage behind

time passage

the mountain whispers
ambling slow and steady through the day,
the stolen hours of business.

Looking Back

Consciousness gnaws at memory
the story is chewed, swallowed
regurgitated back into another form
history is a version, repeated, changed
moving into liquid state.

Departure

driving away over the blunted rocks
leaving is understated
no one waves,
the dogs walk back to the house, depressed
nothing narrates the dust behind the car
which eventually settles,
a wind charm sings slightly, for a second
the place settles again, as if we had never been here
no mark of our time left there.

Perspective

the pages rustle
silence holds me like a parent
the wax sweating from the candle
swaying in the darkness.

Overnight Train

from the stomach of the smoke bulging station
I saw clearly in my mind
how Anna Karenina descended from the train in Moscow
I was pulled into a sensory world
more real than the mild, late winter sun bleached room
of my adolescence

I saw the endless desert of snowfall
between Moscow and St Petersburg
the solitary train track linking these two worlds
the quiet of cold, broken only by the churning train wheels
and the whistle, announcing arrival in small farming towns.

years later, I took the night train
from the place I had seen in my mind
the uninhabitable cold, walking from the golden Moscow subway
to that station.

Less smoke now,
small beds and bunks for the night journey
throughout that desert of ice
It is impossible to sleep
I am on her journey, looking through the window at nothing darkness
the soothing train moving through the cold, alone against the night
I have found the journey, the overnight train of that imagined world.

Deep Forest

the leaves smother me with greenery
a shaking suffocating rhapsody
the refuge of past walks,
where we saw the twinkle of fairies
not even a marked appearance by the sun
no light,
my breathing slows, becomes compromised
something stirs, I stop, confused, caught between then and now
only a bird flies away shaking drops from its wings.

The Anatomy of Falling

unlike a shooting star's gentle trajectory
or the raindrops hitting dry ground
not knowing their worth
this fall
is a graceless arc against the darkness
stones break the descent with harsh misery
hitting the ground, fragile,
the fall is broken only by the exit sign of the light.

Survival

We all fall to our knees
sometimes
in a dark corner of the living
crouched in doubt, humbly singing a soliloquy
with the possibility of an eventual gate, promising dignity
willing ourselves to keep on breathing.

Humidity

ice crackles
moving independently in a glass
condensation gathers on the outside,
a pool forms underneath, staining the inherited wooden table
palpable ancestral anger
your eyes are ice cream melting
wilting, tired in the stifling afternoon

Lullaby

Close your eyes


This autistic love
walks towards you
carrying its  own window of regret
carrying a broken arm
carrying a trace of calm

I sing to you of a poplar forest
of the morning light
in a badly tuned tone


My song carries long gone deficiency
a drafted version of fairy tale love

A mother breathes sounds
safely, into the dying light
well intentioned
suffered, tainted, doubted
hoping for quivering eyelids
precipitating
the forgiving, eventual morning light.

Star gazer

She looked up at the night
She looked through the crystal stars
Those gossiping stars
Not giving them a glance
She saw past them
Only her pain
Reflected back