I FORGOT THE SEA

I forgot the sea
and the sea
forgot me too

moved so far inland
could not get harder rock,
dustier ground

words
rasping, like sandpaper
along your tongue
between your
teeth

dryness, their only
speech
like wind whispering
to dead sea shells.

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TRIPTYCH

open the floodgates

I am dry
I am desiccated

am grape turned raisin
am date
ready to be packed
and
shipped

out this desert

open the floodgates
for I am
in mind of tsunami
(forget oasis!)

I am
smudge of colour, touch
in a shade awaiting
the full triptych
of
extended, extending
supreme masterpiece

HOT MORNING IN TLHABOLOGO

the Sun is hot this morning
in Tlhabologo

things so civilized even
strolling ants behave

yet why should
time be unruly
given how things unfold here?

once fast mushrooming
now at a standstill
roosters crowing, children chattering, birds singing, dogs barking
every noun declined, verb
conjugated
so set in their ways could
be written (would have said stone
but cracked concrete
would fit better)

and in each rough
or polished dwelling

secret
lives

unheard sounds
(again
we might classify

under rough
and polished).

***

note:
Tlhabologo (SETSWANA for “Civilization”) is a village 7km South East of Mafikeng in the North-West Province of South Africa. My wife Modiegi was born and grew up there.

FAR FROM

I am too far inland
for the sea to reach me

far
from the feel
of its rhythm

I will never be
a tough, resourceful
man of the veldt
living
off dust, rock, gnarled bush
and sand
making my home
by scorpion stone
in places too
small to be found on a map.

TRIP TO THABELOGO

so the ersatz Beatles were on
my car radio
singing “All you need
is trade and
commerce”

the song swung across the stratosphere
swam the seven seas (infamous
for their middle passages)
and back
to Liverpool

there I was, back to Thabelogo
to see how much
unravaged child left in
the girl, the woman
I once knew

and loved
how much frail dyke suitable
only for lake or pond
erected there to
stop this
high wave of desert sand
moon-scaping force of
invisible tsunami

MISTAKE FOR ICE

I redecorated
your bedroom

reupholstered
your furniture

splash-painted
your walls

bleeding red paint
like an Aztec victim

as in
the myth where
gods are first lured to Earth
then dragged across
it’s circumference from
jungle to desert

there to
become soil
and rock and

that precious carbon one
might mistake for ice.

THEY MADE A DOCUMENTARY ABOUT MAFIKENG

They made a
documentary about Mafikeng

stopping a few times to
makes sure the name was correct

sent all the footage, every
last shot
by courier to the editors
whose job it was
to make the portrait credible,
the narrative convincing,
to cut out the quasi-delusional, semi-hallucinatory, sort-of-Alice-in
-Wonderland wash and
rinse and spin-cycle
media doctoring

to turn
the impossible into
just a tall order
at
short notice
on
a
shoestring.

MARS

MARS

I wait
for the rain

today, this minute,
the Earth has
become a desert planet
a dry, beige world without
sea or ocean

and time
is
slow, is
Chinese torture

this I know who
wait for rain

wait for rock, glass, stone,
brittleness if bone
a rerun of the red
dust death that
blasted the
surface of
once fertile Mars.

TO THE TOUCH

I sat in the desert
neither water nor woman
anywhere in sight
just sand, rock, stones
and occasionally a patch
of
unbelievably hardy plants

so equipped
to survive

you would
think them blessed, spines
or thorns to
make sure this
admiration never
extends to
touch