citrus

when plucking an orange
it holds on
resists

but
there’s a snap

and fighting no more
as if happy to
as if wanting to
gives itself fully
and
travels the trajectory to its reception
in the hunger of your open palm

so too may death be
into God’s embrace

19 October 2013

so what?

Like oars can cut no scars in water

my pen leaves no marks on paper

Nor will wilderness turn to orchard

nor wine be pressed from stone

I am a poet stagnated by time

abandoned by idea

by vocabulary

by metaphor

by meaning

I am 36 years of blank pages

one in whom a thousand rivers of ink have come to die

But what does it matter –

SHE is a mathematician

24 September, 2013

in pairs

waiting at the skylight of a storm battered ark

a lone dove

FRIDAY, 5 October, 2012

evening

Evening tea at Godown                        

four mute friends in heated debate –

moulding enormous visible words

FRIDAY, 5 October, 2012

 

oxygen

I note the degrees

by which sleep claims you.

How, softly,

another layer of defence falls off you

like a shed negligee,

how all your secrets

defencelessly yawn,

and your heart, now unencumbered

lazily unclenches.

Then

the silence

when you become the unknowing of sorrow

and every breath you take is no longer your own

but the breath of God

tiptoeing through you.

Sunday, 21 October,2012

circle

The night again will return, to terrorise or to soothe,

and, weak as water colour, be washed away by dawn.

Then dawn itself will drown in the rising of the mist

which, in turn, will yield to the rigours of the day.

Flowers will bloom and die, each in its own season,

hearts will be renewed and broken and renewed.

So wars will always be and peace, perhaps, be won

and here a crib be made, and thereafter, a coffin.

Man will be as human as the number of witnesses he has

and ghosts will rise from their longing to be made whole again.

Nations rise and fall and rise and fall once more,

lovers will often separate and, here, love will be made.

 

And the God weeping at Gethsemane because of the vastness of his love,

in the infinity of his solitude, will become just a man.

SEPTEMBER 25, 2012

letter

Dear Mrs. Prime Minister and Son,

 

when you called back the mighty and valiant men of your army and air force

to descend from our hills and return

to their own mothers, fathers, daughters and sons

they forgot to take back with them the ghost of their brother-in-arms.

 

He keeps walking up and down our hills

muttering to himself that he understood at last

the only reason we faced you in battle –

 

that it was never that these hills belonged to us

but that we belonged to these hills.

SEPTEMBER 23, 2012

home

Never having been born

nor having grown up

in the land of my parents’ birth,

I cannot call it home.

While

the land of my birth

will not call me its own

for my blood, though red, though colloquial

is surrogate-native.

 

Forever caught

between indefinites

I am all at once

constant departure and constantly homeward bound.

Tuesday, 23 October, 2012

suddenly

Dawn to

sunset Through

the long silent night

nothing inspired

 

Then

when least expected

God nudged a drowsy thought

and

startled

it jumped onto paper

naked   astonished   inconsolably vulnerable

THURSDAY, 11 October, 2012

song of sarah

Long ago I was wilderness.

I thirsted.

You were renunciation deep in the womb of promise,

you were absence, enormous and unnameable,

you were the deepest secret of God.

Now

I fear I will not recognise you,

or know whether or not to touch you,

to welcome you, to take you to myself,

because sometimes I am half sure that

you are not you

but the vastness of my every yearning willing itself into flesh.

FOR MAYA

SAT 6 October 2012