I did not offer eterninty – I did not think it was mine to give. 20 Nov 2009
I wish, ye Latins, what we now debate Had been resol’d before it was too late’ Much better it had been for you and me, Unforc’d by this our own last Necessity, Than to be earlier wise; than now to call a council, when the Foe surrounds the wall.
Virgils Aeneid – Book II 463
brought blindfolded and disorientated to this moment by our collective desire not to see ourselves
blinking the low horizon the pinking sky – the gold touching soft underbellies of clouds like migrating whales –
brought in the presence of a council of birds proclaiming the light –
would we know do we know if this is the dawn of the world long awaited
or last breath of the world we know.
For Brendan at Desperates where he asks us to “start with two oracles. You can follow my lead and use The Aenead as one source if you have a copy, but any classic text will do — the Bible, Shakespeare, a volume of your favorite poet or one on Native American myth, whatever. Open the book blind and let your finger fall where it may on the page and write down whatever lines you struck on.
Next, cast a more self-referential oracle from something you created, a poem or journal or dream. Source a few lines in the same accidental manner.
Mentally line up the two oracles side by side and then listen for what burps creatively. Maybe there’s no sense to it; maybe something raw and real might shine through. And feel free to cheat!” it is worth reading the full essay and prompt here.
Leentjiesklip – photo credit Tanya Russouw – September 2023
and today, and today cuckooo calls the spring
last week today, sunday our first life was lost, in our small coastal town, to the ocean’s rise.
on my phone, on my screen, on the front page of the actual made of paper paper a picture of a murky wave – crashing the sea wall – heaving taller than trees into the air on impact – charging forward a disturbed monstrous churning
in the foreground a family, feet already wet, run towards the camera, small figures faces arms hair eyes trying to outrun the wave
this is not stock footage of a generic wave – not an ai rendering of some future imperfect this is the ocean – our ocean swallowing a vast expanse of beach, breaching the old wall to claim the shore and all that is built there.
this is not the whole picture but a cropped version of the truth. it does not show – out of respect for the living and the dead – the old woman running from a wave we all knew was coming – is coming, the old woman swept down the road among the floating cars and wheelie bins – swept away. the old woman who died moments later.
this picture is all of us running from a wave far bigger than our collective living memory allows us to imagine.
and even that is not the whole picture.
we live in a small town – we live in the hills behind and above a small coastal town
like a spine like a snake like a straight line of circuitry on a microchip of a planet, a road stretches through town – stretches 2255 km from cape town in the south west along the coast to the border in the east before swinging north to ermelo and the coal mines – a long, long road stringing us along
stringing us along town by hamlet city town this is an artery – a mainline – the N2 that trucks goods and fuel up and down the coast – a crude drawing of the edge on the indian ocean. linking rich farmlands and port and industry making sure there is food on the shelves, petrol in our tanks and an economy tick tick ticking over.
boom
last week today sunday, new moon wind driven storm surge saw the N2 swamped – vehicles halted clogged stopped while the ocean made her voice heard.
built in the seventies this road pins a shifting dune and a migrating river mouth, holding the ocean and river still – halting their old exuberance, their crazy tidal dance their slow embrace – holding them bridge pillar and embankment for 50 years
last week today sunday – their pounding thrashing music – their wild lament and awe filled reunion could be heard all the way up here in the hills.
precarious is it not, this life we lead of roads and ports and atm’s of money in banks and food on shelves, grown shipped continent to continent so we cannot hear anymore, the moans of the hungry far away above the snarling deaf of the internal combustion engine
precarious is it not hearing a music of ocean we have forgotten how to dance to.
today sunday and every chat and post and forum tings and pings notifying of storm warnings issued by national weather services more severe than any warning ever issued before – more severe than last sunday severe.
and all the while the rain falls gentle soaking gathering day after day – frogs sing a spring’s green uprising and roots settle deep and slake their thirst.
yesterday – sunday the storm broke down the coast unleashing wind and rain – pummeling severing the N1 and N2 yet again – alternative routes mud slid and swamped – and lives lost
we are lost – knee deep to a future we have no name for – rescues, mop up operations – assessing damages – food parcels swung precarious (again) on lines across swollen rivers to towns that no longer have bridges
and we are fumbling – putting one foot in front of the other hoping for solid ground.
on monday we hunker down – waiting for what might come but does not.
on tuesday the sun rises in a clear sky after a nights solid rain. the small river deep in the forest valley tumbles rock face to pool and sings
slip of a girl tarred and feathered by the same slippery tongue that knows no truth but fear.
when i say witch and you say die, what is the dark foreboding that shadows your trees and blights your crops –
were you ever truly afraid of me or were you merely clearing the fields – levelling them (in a manner of speaking) until all who spoke for the mother could no longer speak at all and all your dark imaginings could remain unseen.
claiming the living in the name of the dead counting trees as commodities earth as possesion to be bought and sold in perpetuity and so on and so on sign here please
there is no witch that lived that could turn barren the earth as capitalism has done
2.
birds of a feather flock together so here we are and here we have gathered in the name of juicy living and words shaping and shaped by the world –
hands held just so so the energy flows woman to woman around and between until the forest is all the world and all there is is the circle –
smiling we greet each other knowing knowing
and of course we cackle between words between lines between worlds as one does when all is held in a circle
when the circle broke – not that these things can ever truly be broken, and we seven were stretched thin across the globe
when the circle severed there was silence for a while for centuries
and the spaces between were lost except in dream.
3.
i was prayed upon when i was fifteen slip of a girl sniffed out as the vessel, the house, of satan in the room
had hands layed upon me, on my head, in prayer – trying to claim me for the sky god, the father gods the gods of fear and owning
and no one no one in that place stood up for me – said hands off my daughter, our daughter of daughters of daughters hands off this daughter of the moon
i was prayed upon because the word of god did not move me any more that it could move mountains
and how would i, could i house the devil our father made and our fathers’ fathers who art in heaven when spring was rising through my feet and my body, my house, was filled with birds singing.
4.
ah – so we are here again as we were as we are there is tea brewing (and maybe a storm) and blood, as there is when the moon is just so, and these feathers that grow prickle pierce sharp sprouting through skin until they soft unfurl along clavicle and scapular and arm and spine –
the stars are still as they were as they are
my fingers trail ink across the walls
the sky waits
in response to Brendan’s exquisite essay In the Footseps of our Feathers at Desperate Poets.
deep shadow purple and heavy with dew i pick morning violets,
small water orbs petal cupped refracting silver and spring,
held by the sweet scent of every lifetime spent wet-kneed in the morning, picking quiet violets forest edge
it is a lonely sound the distant hollow thud of the gravediggers spade forest edge in the morning but death has always been lonely – unwanted, unsummoned unexpected even when it is inevitable
yesterday old brannon-pony died late evening. used up his time a decade ago yet lived on and still he greeted in his low breath voice and scoffed his food, gums squeaking on toothless green peaches late summer windfall on the lawn
and still he walked on his doddering legs and still he dreamed in dapple shade beneath the trees in the morning forest edge
we sat with him, jem and i, cloud sky opening to the stars beyond as night cold drew close
sat with him where his legs had given way, where his breath had slowed, where warm beneath his winter coat fingers and palm listened as the beat of the great mother drum in his chest became the silence between stars.
forest edge in the morning i picked violets and forget-me-nots as offering to the gods of little things
because who else, in the great wild heaving of the world, would notice the passing of small a old pony – who else would know the empty space he leaves benind in the morning forest edge.
water dense and heavy boned – yet we dream of flight.
larva
left high and dry with subsiding rain – the frog eggs wait precarious in the face of a warming wind
gathering them in a fit of nostalgia she placed them in the pickle jar older than herself, filled it with water and pond weed, and waited.
the eggs plumped, became pin prick lives – black swirls in their little orbs alone.
it took longer than she thought, the hatching, on her desk at the window catching afternoon sun and the waning moon weeks until dark forms began move.
tuesday – just before she left for the city they began, all tail and wiggle until they hung like stretched commas along the glass – alive.
such odd little things – gilled grazers of the puddle and pond.
i have inherited them for now, on my desk at the window learning to swim in afternoon light. i will release them in a day or two in a fish free pond where their chances are good.
most will reach puberty grow lungs and legs and a taste for the crunch squish of a long tongue wrapped around small flesh.
they will sing about it loud at night, about their crazy years, their quest for love, about the rain.
will they remember their life of gill and tail and greens, or will they believe they always were frog.
pupa
late autumn barred eggarlet moth takes the sky lays eggs in the searsia trees – bundles them tight near the growth tips flies off on white wings into the night.
in june they hatch – hardly noticeable at first in the dark days of winter a thick green canopy obscuring their task –
by july branches bare of leaf reveal candyfloss clumps of caterpillars golden hair catching winter light.
they will strip the tree bare leaf by leaf cycling nutrients to the roots below feeding winter cuckoos making space in the forest for light to slip through while they grow and grow and grow.
do they know they will moth – drop satiated to the forest floor build cob cocoons from their hair and dirt
do they know they will sleep contained on tree, under rock, until spring
grow wings take flight mate, lay eggs die.
do they fear change
would they rather live caterpillar eternal, forgo flight for the fear of letting go what they know to become what they are
or do they too, dream of sky.
imago
odd little things metamorphic forms
how will we know if this is all we are or if this is what we lose on becoming.
For Brendan’s ODD LITTLE THINGS challenge over at Desperate poets.
and we still deep bundled in winter sleep stumbled out the house half-remembering his song.
2. on my desk between potted plants and two birdhouses storm-downed and in for repair – amidst pencils and paintbrush and candle and river stones – six ants are carrying off the wing of a larger, now clearly flightless, insect –
i sip of my water replace the glass to the side for a better view of their lumbering task.
i’ve moved wardrobes and fridges and cumbersome dressers up and down stairs – even moved the piano once or twice – i know the idle banter, the careful negotiation, the counting-in the lift that it takes to work together –
and at what point do i suspend belief in our own pinnacle of sentience and know that these ants have just made another god-awful joke about the theory of flight and told each other to mind their toes while manoeuvring a path across the desk.
by the time these words are written the ants and severed wing have disappeared over the edge of my desk as ants do – muttering and grunting as they went.
3. first week of august and freesia bud pushes petal and petal to the wind
a deep scented morning cold breath
a promise of the year that turns.
4. yesterday, a welcome respite from weeks of cold and rain, was a good day to trim some goats – the mid-season faces and tails and feet trims, guaranteed to have us smelling like a goat by noon –
these are the constansts, the unchanging of here first freesias in august cold, taaibos caterpillars path strewn gathering winter mud for their cocoons, narina trogon flitting bare-branched around the quiet garden, warm fires, dark mornings goats.
but up the road a tide is pushing a landscape changing irrevocably in human time –
the first fence enclosed a dam, a spring, a watersource for the living – then another fence and another some trees came down a subdivision or two then more fence until a walk up the road becomes a walk between fences 2m tall with mowed grass verges.
two weeks ago we found man and machine gathered at the end of the road – measuring and marking to pave the road (well the first bit of it anyway) it is to have curbstones and gutters and all the trimmings of suburbia –
seems the big shiny cars that live behind nice high fences feel out of place in these dirt road forest hills – seems they have chosen to make a home here – wild life lovers who want the birds but not the trees, the bushbuck but not the forest.
they sing the song of digger and chainsaw and brick until they are comfortable, making it all pretty and palatable and nice.
5. it all weighs weight stacks up against and on – some mornings six blankets under it is hard to move – face it all all the constants and changings and inevitablities
and yet just when we feel there is no lower we can fall we find ground beneath us – earth we find ourselves on our knees, hands cupped with soil praying. our mother who art the only heaven we have ever known give us this day.
6. there is a household insecticide called doom – (honest truth)
it is very popular – old ladies(among many many others) in cardigans and sensible shoes buy it, put it in their shopping baskets between their thrift pack of apples, tin of apricot jam and an all purpose cleaner.
and oh the awful irony – of spraying our homes with doom and then hoping we are not home when the apocalypse comes to call – when it crashes our shores, or empties our shelves or melts or burns or infects – or does any number of things an apocalypse does.
is that it is that the tipping point? the incredible human arrogance that thinks we can spray our house with doom and live.
7. in air bright with cold the full moon rose in a clear still sky
and the hills and the hills and the hills rejoiced.
i suppose it would happen, leaning in to what it means to live alive in the world to live truly open,
i suppose it would happen that i would wonder where you were in the world where you are
and how it happened that our way together was lost.
2.
when we forget ourselves for a while – forget the me, forget the us, forget who we are as a species, do we forget the how to’s of living – the harvest and plant and caress and spin. do we forget how to live –
when we forget ourselves for a while and wake on a morning in a half foreign body and wonder where we are where we were all those mornings when light first touched leaf –
do our hands forget the how to of loving – how love of here becomes action becomes living alive
3.
it is hard to remember contracted contraction sitting morning desk with scarf and gloves and windows misted to the world, it is hard to remember those summer nights, the expansive singing of all that lives naming the stars and the spaces between –
its hard to remember who we are contracted as we are by the overwhelming what now-ness of the world, overwhelming breath held-ness don’t look/don’t look away-ness of the world
it is hard to remember contractions as we are
but we are all this night rain, big sky, wings wheeled translucent across the clearing, dance-stamping splashing ankle knee thigh deep in golden water as the tide rushes the estaury cold and salt, clamour valley, tall tree reaching for breath and light all this, all this
we are all of this are we not in the dark between points of the southern cross stretched bright on this winter sky, in the dark in the space between are uncountable stars
and lifting our faces warm breath to the night we remember it is the dust of stars that grows our bones earthbound it is the warmth of stars that animates our form
we are we carry we become all of this.
For Brendan’s wonderful weekly challenge Woe My Spurs: Desperate Elegies
are there words for this light – words for the way these trunks twist crevice for lichen and moss. is there a name for shadows strewn forest floor like windfall petals,
when i sit here really here on this leaf litter floor, are there words for the forest that rises and sways through me, plays me wood string resonant among the trees.
in the space between here and now, in the space between two hands held together in prayer, in the space between me and i, the stars lean close in an expansive sky remembering –
remembering in the the silence between that in our bones in our cells in the fractal minuteness of our being we too once were stars.
fresh poetry 