Jos Dancing
I would not have said that much, dear friend,
had I that hour's notice of your death.
I would have visited though, stooping low
under the boughs of your elderly trees.
I’d remember their fruit and be grateful,
not grieved. We’ll have smiled our greetings
(it had always sufficed). & we would almost
play cards, then decide not to, letting instead,
the chatter of some radio deejay drown the
plip-plop of serum in your bedside drip stand.
That hour will linger (like all our hours).
I'd pick some apples. They won't tempt you.
We'd think the same thoughts, but won't say them.
We'd read the sorry cards flowering by your bedside -
until dying batteries tinny and kill the deejay’s voice,
undressing that shy silence appearing
between us, like froth drying out on a
slap of soapsuds. & you’d clear your throat and
hum that ‘60s song, to which we danced in Jos,
and I’ll know you knew how it was with me,
and I’ll hum it too. and that would do:
two greying strangers growing fond again
in the lull of a distant memory of
an almost life, furling up four decades
into a final spin on a dream dance floor.
sleep well my friend. I would not have said that much
- but I would have sung that lullaby with you.
home for sundered lumps
all the birds on that beach were crows
& all their songs were lonesome caws.
saw the lump of coal on the sand that day.
black is what it was, and skewered through;
wet, and left behind.
asked him where he went,
where was home.
here where I am, he said. for
the rock from which I’m hewn is burned.
& there’s no hearth in the world with a piece of me.
& there’s nowhere in the world I’d rather be.
here’s home, till I’m washed elsewhere.
then all birds in the world cawed once,
and all was still.
The Empty Page
When I wrote the solemn pledge, ‘I AM TRUE’
I did not walk too far along to find I was a lie.
(For the bug smoked in the guts of fish
is fish.)
So I erased and found the small
and pompous words ‘I AM’;
which was a name that God had chosen first.
Now, I am not God
(Although I can also on an empty page
create a world that won’t acknowledge me),
so I erased again and left
the humble, uncontentious ‘I’;
Until the lie of life began to dawn on me
in greying hairs
and I saw ahead of me
the days when even ‘I’
would be a lie.
So I erased again, and found the empty page.
I found the true, the empty page.
Lungfish
I use my tears the way an angry writer uses ink.
They are not to lubricate my lines.
They flow to drive the pain that drives me to the brink.
From where I estivate in mines,
they run to drive the joy
that drives my hand, to drive the rage
that drives my recalcitrant mind
into the freedom of the gateless page.
The African Lungfish broods,
prisoned in his parched burrow of riverbed mud.
He waits for rain. For years,
he waits for rain,
brooding on the drought
that drives him yearly to extinction’s edge,
until it pours, whether in deluge
or in the inches of his daily dreams,
and he breaks from prison into gateless streams.
Only tears of rain,
in rage,
or peace,
could set him free.
Only tears can set me free.
Love Lessons
She learnt her first love lesson from a dog,
oddly enough.
It was her name on his receipt and bill of sale.
They were an item, girl and dog,
those first few years.
It was her face he saw,
it was her hands
that fed and cleaned, that stroked and walked,
that kept that dog that taught that lesson to the girl.
Then came the dreaded business trip;
three months the dog lived with her mum;
till girl returned to raised hackles and growls.
And six months home did not rekindle love.
He was now mum’s dog.
So, sure she learnt her second lesson
there and then,
of fickle love too quickly pawned to
less worthy, perhaps, but nearer arms
that fed and stroked and kept that dog
that broke that virgin heart.
Decades would pass before
the drip-dripping of life would
adumbrate the first lesson of love,
the earlier sin,
the first abandonment to a less worthy, perhaps,
but dearer job that fed and clad
and kept that girl that broke that virgin heart. |
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