The Child (from Ingrid Jonker)

I want to be the child in these poems

I want to sit with a straw hat and a basket

But my maps are drawn with too many lines

hearts lost in tossed water

knocking are the people

a small boy beaten, playing in the wind

an older boy, coughing

needing to get a school registration

my own children needing

Clinging, unlike the farm dust
too stubborn to scrub away in a rusted bath after sunset

Finding myself  lost

I see the pictures on the old walls

the middle earth, peacefully hanging alone

the gemsbok safe in the wind

But the path I walk

is too full of this trail of followers


Perhaps, the find a cleared vision

is to see them all

most likely unchanged,

waking, walking

after a brief hand held out.

Play

Make believe there is only you

what would you do?

I would play the piano again

I would make everything simple

Would you also want to keep all those

things away

when you play 

pretend to be beyond

what the hours shake back and forth

Only me

in a pretend improvement box

There would be grass fields

leading to a lighthouse

a self designed journey to a self faithful place

a light on an ocean 

hearing only the grass

the curtain falls on the dollhouse dream

After all

You strut in a presence
peacock proud
while I wipe tears in the corner
another person
discarded
thrown aside
with an outworn love

X and Y

She was a girl
who danced in the rain
and held her head up to the drops
she didn't know right from wrong
she didn't understand how
to love him
how to run away, to save herself
from that gaping raw hole of need.

He was just a man
who walked without shoes in the veld
who wanted to to be loved
who wanted a best friend
who made a mistake
he didn't understand how
drawing the right lines between them
it was his void, so great
matched to her open young heart.

They never found birds flying against the sunset
the paradise of amnesty trees
and peace.

Twelve o' Clock

Midnight striking
no Christmas ghost
wandering spirit
just a little girl shaking me awake
politely pleading please
mummy help
there's a monster in her tummy
she says
she keeps spitting him out
she feels tired without sleep
in the unknown bewitching dark
of this hour

Two, next generation

Not like The Three Little Pigs
Or the Famous Five
Better than the adventures of a Secret Seven
We only need each other
A double agency, repeated code
double sided tape effective
working
unscrambling
unison

Namib Desert

Bleached, unscarred land
where only the bones
of natural selection
break the line of white dust on the horizon

The Portal

The age when you make friends
with stars
in a moment
you will walk into fairy land
hop on the rock,
twirl once
pick a purple flower
hold the prince's hand

She plays all day in fairy land
never once forgetting
hop on the rock
twirl once
pick a purple flower
to return back to this life