the moon grows full in an april sky and still the world is quiet – humans gone to roost a great clattering noise of centuries suddenly stopped when hope returned to the city streets it came with claw and hoof and webbed toes scrabbling on the pavement. it padded and clattered patterned fur and…
my oupa lived in the outside room of his large house. he had grown up in sutherland under the vast karoo skies before the observatory was built there herded sheep as a boy before the wars changed the world – despite his ancestry and the complexity of south african colonial politics he joined churchill’s…
with mud soaked leaf hands we greet the sodden sky gulping mouthfuls of drizzle cloud from the road down the driveway water snakes and froths its way to the contour ponds brimming now with new rain and frogsong.
found a poet last night late in a quiet house devoured poem after poem, like a bird like the shoals of big-eyed moonfish like a mongoose slipping into undergrowth – you don’t want to see those alone. you want to call and point say there the wing catching light, see there they flash silver…
it was my plan all along to lie down there among the twigs and fallen leaves, let the forest have me because there is something in my bones that does not know these days can’t taste the sunlight or feel vast oceans pulse in the night. three days now the snail has been sleeping on…
there is nothing to be said of what was or might be on days like these when the tang sweet of summer leans light into autumn and fruit hangs full round on the trees.
there were big windows, wooden floors and an indoor quiet that made our ears hum. it was monday morning after a favourite uncle’s birthday on the weekend i had made him a card drawn flowers because he like them copied in my newly acquired hand Dear Les HAPPY BIRTHDAY Love Lindi it took me most…
i will stop my mouth with poems, eat through continents and centuries shovelling hungry words like a dog hunkered over scrapings so when the walls are too close to speak this awkward now words like broken teeth and shards of poems will fall from my mouth impersonal, fragments of snow and bone and flowers…
sunbird against the window this morning first light must have come in through the new opened door purring wings against the glass quicker than the cat i cover her in hands still the beating wings feel her long beak find rest between fingers outside above the valley i slowly release her body no bigger…
sometimes i went with my mother to work night duty at the old-age home in town trailing quiet shadow behind her on the evening round out to the rooms and through frail care. there was a woman there i don’t know her name, they were all mr and mrs somebody to a seven year…