Yellow roses
Bright bells ringing in a vase,
yellow roses befriend the morning,
sunshine coating the table the colour of egg yolk.
Fat baby’s fists they grab at the light,
only to soften as they catch it,
as paper does when it turns to flame.
I bend to smell their honey-breath,
sweet as a storms’s clear tunnel eye.
Vetch’s Reef
‘Vetch’s Reef’ isn’t a natural coral reef — it’s the remains of an old pier originally built in the 1860s by engineer Captain James Vetch, intended as a breakwater for Durban Harbour
Love is imperfect, it tears,
like the sea’s soft muslin this placid evening,
rent by rubble from the old pier;
waves unthreading over the shallows
where the reef rumbles,
remembering your storms, and mine.
Yes, you failed – yet what you made endures;
nursery for sponges and hard corals,
moray eels, damsels, wrasse,
fish as myriad as feelings
which never take the shape you mean them to;
sheltering in the breakwater.
The dark draws her veils as I turn away,
passing sisters playing as the water rises,
under the eye of their solemn father.
It hurts to love you, and still I love you, Vetchies’ arc creasing like a crooked smile
across the blue-black water.
Vetch’s Pier
I came to this beach with your brother soon before you were born.
I remember how full I was with you,
as wind shapes a sail,
how he and I balanced laughing on the outfall pipe,
as it pumped sand into the bay.
Today I leave you sleeping, oystered in light,
your body grown long as a life-raft,
lifted by a new tide;
to walk beside a sea still as a lake,
where fishers cast and re-cast their lines,
laying claim to its plenty.
Midnight
Like a windmill, Karoo night creaks its sheet metal blades,
pulling the stars up like sweet water
into the sky’s deep reservoir,
encircled by cockscomb hills.
At the river, a dry wind unspindles dust-foals
coming round the bend, skittish as spring hares,
until their whickering is lost—
like the whisper of an inland sea—
their quartz hooves pocking the flood plain,
pale and muted as an ancient moon.
Woman-child
A ceiling fan filtered air thick as water,
suspending dust motes, algae in a clouded pool.
Full as a fruit, the sun hung from a sky
languid as the litchi tree's new calyxes.
I drew the curtain to shade your face
as you slept in the bed where we made you,
daughter who'd begun to bleed like me.
You'd brought me your photo album, showing
me photos of you as a baby, as a child,
your limpid eyes ringed by the pallour of
incomprehension, until I felt your head
grow heavy on my arm, your breath deepen,
as when, in those first years, you fed.
Prince Alfred’s Pass
Find me an atlas to map a way back to you,
and I’ll trace the route in permanent marker.
Mend the broken bench we sat on,
splintered as the wound we share,
so that I may carry your light
along mountain passes where baboons bark,
and the road winds dry as a river under wind-blown cliffs.
Talk with me, although your mind flits like the butterflies in the krantzes,
showing indigo, then white as the day moon.
Laugh with me, as when I was a child
and death was just a word.
Reach through my car window as I leave you,
calling ‘last touch’ as I feel your fingers slip from mine,
my mother smiling at your side;
your fierce eyes a compass for my journey.
Catch and release
Out walking one evening,
I saw boys skim stones into the sea-shallows;
small black birds they flew,
low as the terns hunting over the water.
I stopped to see a fisher haul in his catch,
cartilagenous heart writhing on sand.
I watched him unhook his line,
and throw the ray back under a wave,
where muscular as a vulva, she beat
towards the open sea; dark angel,
her wings mottling mauve as the dusk
as she vanished.
Whispering thanks, I stood there;
plough snails plunging bold as lovers
into the gold under my feet.
Blue Rocks
Restive horses, these rocks, their bruised haunches slicked with foam,
as they wade knee-deep in sea.
There’s no taming the waves they face,
driven wild by a spring tide that covers the beach
like cloud overwhelming sky,
the herd lifting obsidian hooves as if to wound.
Up on the headland the ponies bend their necks in a green field sheltered by poplars;
the wind moving through grass gentle as hands untangling a mane,
in light bridled fine as salt spray,
while I remember another kind of weeping.
Mourners
Even though I’ve lost too much,
I’ll let you in –
boy crouched under the ferns –
collecting sun lozenges in the dust,
your hair at your neck, yellow as stamens.
Ardour’s heat bursting, relentless as summer;
I’ll shelter you as you piece together our sweet and sharded hearts.
Blue dark
Gesturing towards the window, you said ‘It’s pitch black outside’,
but beyond the looming trees, I saw indigo,
a north wind clearing the high skies
translucent as the sun’s late blue flame.
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