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.