It was a hard rain that fell the night I left. The kind of rain that slaps the years from your skin, laying bare the places where your memories crawled before your turns and crossings cut their tracks across your face. I watched the first drops explode in blisters of dust, up and down these baked Karroo streets. Every vowel and consonant of the lines I carved in the halls of my highest hours, every measured cadence I spilled across the pages of my early wilding, were all strung among the silver beads and threads of that last night’s cascade. There were bones in the storm too, hooked in the palms, skewering the words as they fell to hang like medals from the epaulettes of the proud and glistening aloes. Down the softening street the hiss of a long summer’s cracked and scalded scales whispered in the puddles of streetlights where the wind braided the runnels and curls of winter’s welcome trespass. Under the shingles of a Sweet Thorn tree, puffs of Cape Robins huddled in the crowding night. The Huntress Moon shrugged off her shrouds, and nested a while in the cradle of the high Bluegums where Smith Street was flowing over Mill.
Read MoreLast nigh in my garden during curfew I met the fevered stare of the stars burning in their own veiled quarantine, their divinely ordained course corrupted and reset to a seemingly aimless loiter. A storm of thoughts trespassed, as they do, this late at night during an endless pandemic lockdown. What is time? Does it heal? Can it stop everything from happening at once? Why do teeth have nerves? Is the light in my neighbour’s window a sign that she's all wrapped up between the covers of a comforting read, or is it a shield set to deflect the dead-quiet of the night? Through the village the silence hung like breath-fruit slowly exhaling, quivered only by the distant barking of dogs in warning, camaraderie or loneliness. Loneliness is a hollowing of the bones; it sucks at the marrow and crawls into empty spaces. It has an appetite that is only satiated when it finally gnaws at the soul. It must not be allowed to feed. Deep in the night, down the street, across the country, over time zones, we are all connected; not just by a virus that has us bound to its confines, but by the stars that light our paths, as the Spirits do, in the sky as quiet as the dreaming of trees. Last night in my garden during curfew, i called my neighbour with the lights on, with nothing to say but her name.
Read MoreBehind Induna’s kraal, the old women chatter in patches of maize, the songs of their youth snagged on thorn in the fields of their barren years; the fire that kindled the heat of their dance now dust on the husks of marbled corn. Under Induna’s tree, the weight of the wounded day is lifted in threads of pipe-smoke curled with the laughs and the snorts of the shaded old men, the stone-ground Capsicum husk of their voices flavouring the delirious dreamings of crows. Beyond Induna’s paths, the air carries the essence of the hills’ wild flanks, down to the sea where the old Milkwood lives, her swollen knees buried in the shells of a war raged on her by the Saints and Saltires of a God whose seed never stirred her soil. Around Induna’s grave, the herding gulls scavenge the remains of the wind flayed by those foreign flags, chasing the echoes of every aching minute where the last songs of the fallen lifted their dying breaths and lay them on the lips of the children. In this indefensible hour, I carry the shame on my skin down to the moon's new tide: I sink my paleness into the cushioning deep, down into the crackle and wash of the annointing veil, each jewelled flake authored by an ancient wanderlust, stranded, beached and fading among the scatterings of the fallen oath thirsting for the telling along these dreaming shores.
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