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Silver sketches wants and needs
around blackness,
a frivolity:
a hem, a trimming, a detail
beautifully executed

Rendered light, complex
gradients, fool
the eye -
just so much heavy air
slowly greying

We, caught without
shelter, in a burgeoning
flood, gnaw at
hope

This year has been a wading,
a drowning;
light breaks water
sometimes, or an object
falling
that won’t float

Today
I am looking for a quiet place,
to meditate or to grieve.
Both.
My father’s birthday
today. Had he been alive.

Had he been alive
his pain would have been unbearable.
Not physical, but complete. The total self.
I would not wish that on him,
anyone.

Today I read that 61 miners died
for the sake of gold.
Glittering bodies,
choked,
lost,
entombed before their time.

The mineshaft was closed down;
they were illegally there.
Thirty pieces of gold that betrayed them.
I think of Wilde’s The Young King, of Steinbeck’s The Pearl.

This is a country where a bus driver earns more than a young doctor.

I am looking for a quiet place
to begin to understand the rape of Africa,
the avaricious salacious DNA
that shapes my blood
cutting my ancestral keys.

The jasmine outside the kitchen window is over, for now.
The flowers have burst and browned, their inimitable scent just
skirting memory. But I remember —
my growing up was punctuated
by the sweetly soft fragrance, now forever redolent
of lazy yellow summers and warm wind.
I can be on the back stoop in an instant,
sipping fizzy apple juice and eating mangos.
A radio would be on, music drifing in and out
of hearing, our fox terrier in turn
leaping for attention
and racing off to chase the
fairies I believed were inhabiting
the rockery,
the lavender bush,
playing tag between the phlox.

This weekend, this Sunday past, I found myself
back in time for a moment,
a bouquet of my mother’s silent laughter
and tinkling bracelets
and husky voice
trimming my peripheral
perception.
And there, just beyond, my grandmother’s
neat
tiny
stitches
that drew elaborate floral embellishments
on dining linen,
a thought scented with
the pervasive sweet fragrance
of the sweetpeas
we would bring to her. Where she lived
there was no space
to grow her jasmine.

This is what I see first thing in the morning —
before the sun comes up, the moon not yet set,
and me, heavy-lidded with a myopic
effects pallet:

impressionist filters laid over everyday objects
to make them lovely, to diffuse blunt light,
muddy blackest shadow, smudge edges left too
sharp.

There is a lesson here, and although I’m not sure
I can read it, it has something to do with morality:
too much is cut and dried. Life is not like that
at all.

There is no easy end to war,
no heart that quickly embraces change,
no stomach that settles in the flak of doubt.
Children will die.

And when women can no longer give birth
our bones grow brittle, something in us dries up
or is scorched. It is inevitable.
And it is hard.

Sometimes dementia is preferable
to reliving parts of ourselves.

It’s Freedom Day today.
Fifteen years since the watershed when
the majority of South Africans
were recognized human again,
allowed to be seen,
to have opinion,
to share the air
and physical space again;
finally, given back their right
to vote…

And this morning bursts its banks
with mixed missives:
a comment offering a glorious
extract in a language I remember,
one not found here –
Stoep Zen: A Zen Life in South Africa by Antony Osler.

There is a type of humour
you won’t find anywhere else,
peppered with (sore) truths
and hope and wry mirth at the
African Condition.

This is something the First World
can never understand. There is a chaotic richness
which is too base
too visceral for nations
whose people live under the heel of
projected perfection
where no teeth are too white,
bad hair days are chemicated into submission
and there is a particular smile you must learn
to wear for photographs.
No illness is without a drug treatment,
and poor people are simply
somewhere
out of sight
across the border
across the tracks
in service
not
at all
real.

Today I vowed to avoid the news.
Good intentions to keep the day unpolluted
with reality bytes.
I slipped, however, fell
into my routine, found updates on
Italy’s earthquake
and there was
Silvio Berlusconi, his Moscow meeting abandoned,
his political feet in the disaster zone, painting an unreality
for earthquake survivors:

To lift your spirits,
he said,
go to the beach;
imagine you are camping,
he said,
while you are living in your tents.

Is this a cultural crossed wire, I wondered,
where such stoic everydayness in the face of calamity
is de rigueur, and I am The Ignorant Outsider?
But no. Italian tent villages shake with ire:
this man rents a frescoed Renaissance palace in Rome,
owns villas elsewhere.
Not villa, villas.

Emergency services have done as much as they can,
but at night, the temperatures outdoors
plummet. There are not enough blankets.
A change of clothes is a luxury.
A woman distracts her child with pet birds
abandoned in the disaster,
now adopted anew. They are lucky:
there is a vet amongst these dispossessed,
animals will feel a kind hand also.

This morning my day started with the words,
The agency that regulates rubber ducks…

I feel sure it will improve.

The report was about phthalates in chew toys for children.
And the agency is probably CPSC. But
still.
It’s hard not to imagine a bunch
of suits and skirts shaking fists full of rubber duckie
at each other, all tantrums-and-timeouts.

I know.
This is serious stuff. Phthalates are evil.
Despite the good science which apparently shows they are not evil
enough.

Despite the seriousness of it all,
the phrase made me think of Ping, the duck.

I loved the story and would spend hours
looking at the pictures, writing my own childish details
into the fabric of the tale.
There was something comforting about the life of
Ping and his big family and the boat that meant he could go
anywhere.
I wanted to meet the boy who caught Ping; he was interesting.
He didn’t look like me, he lived on a river, he could go
anywhere
the river
went.
And he didn’t want to chew up Ping
for dinner.
That sat well with me.

It’s already late in this ripening day,
the sound of cars has overwhelmed birdsong,
the coffee tastes a little stale. It is only
mid-morning, but I feel as though already
the day is getting away from me
with its stories of undeserved bonuses
and Blackwater fallout
and Chinese drywall that makes you sick.

Today we commemorate the end of snakes
on a small jewel of land (how those reptiles have been
misunderstood – as if to paint them all colour of
human evil will save us)

Today the pope sets foot on dark, hot soil;
beware, beware -
snakes form the fabric of Africa: old souls returned,
they are revered.
They beat the heart of darkness.

I am rambling, gambling away
my time on reports of chance and change
because a budding spring rides our senses
lends a freshness to our jaded eyes.
We read missives couched in newborn petals,
the crowding cherry blossoms,
tattooed on parched woody limbs
in lime-bright bunchlets.
Portents, all, of a new
new thing.

It’s been a long, quiet while
since I was awake before the sun.
This morning — a fire in the grate,
hot sweet coffee and the occasional car:
we are not in the city now.
Suburban sounds must do, at least until
rush hour when our street corner becomes
a chaotic junction of arterial routes,
cars like corpuscles
gone rogue,
multiplying madly;
or that’s how it seems.

But for now I can still see the moon and
count the passing traffic.

I will never tire of the space in silence
that opens up inside the mind,
this time of day.
There is opportunity to process
magnificent ideas and
morning news –
uncomfortable things:

invisible people –
real stories
by real people
bringing visibility
to the issues of homelessness

Not such a rosy future for some.

Today
clouds stutter across the sky;
scattered seed-like
they look ready to root,
spread and grow shade.
But secretly,
far too insubstantial to coat the blue
completely,
instead they puff along,
torn by wind,
whipped out of shape,
divided and divided.
I imagine these misty wraiths of rain
are drawn to coalesce,
become nimbus to drench this world,
quench this awful drought that sucks up
kindness.
But there is no dark and rolling promise
for us today.
First
there are forces that must join,
conditions that must call in favours:
there will be nothing precipitate here.

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