Monthly Archives: January 2020

by

In defence of silence

Audio version

Go to the water. Sit

At the feet of the Casuarinas

Cushion of Dahlwah’s shed silver hairs

Where lost children flee

Listen for the stories the women told

Wait

Here on the mossy toes

Of the sandstone tower

For the rock warbler to whistle

In between insects

From its sideways perch

Walk with me

Stalk the blue marron before

It shoots into the sandy gloom

Tea- coloured mirrors of yesterday’s rain

Stay

In this breathing, declaring forest

Unfurling itself from forgotten dust

This does not need to be solitary

But how else can I hear them speak?

Listen with me

Let words coalesce in the spaces we leave for them

Let love do the rest.

Go to the water. Sit.

Wait. Listen.

Receive with thanks.

by

12/12/13

In a paradigm of eyes

Lies paths charted yesterday

By earnest men in boats of words

Restless hearts for those in yokes

To see them broke, and baring pure light,

Aglow from inside. Fields none of us can tread:

Foxglove and feverfew

Febrile dreams, vivid in beds

Of eyebright, for the Lord’s delight

We are bound to these crosses

Hung on them

Drawn and quartered by words opposed

Hoping for an outlook of yeild,

Something unseen

A gleam, buried

Beneath the roots and skeletons of weeds

Thorn upon thorn piled in this rubbled mess

Of the ones who have been pulled up before

We live with our eyes, searching for that horizon

In the sharp smoke of guttering flames

Arching back upon ourselves,

Needing your streams to clear our heads

Your breeze of change, the steadiest gale in this

Storming uncertainty.

We’re yelling for you to wake,

Our rudder. Our oars.



by

Simbahan

A tree is a tree is a tree

Concrete is concrete

Dust is as a Bangladeshi street

Motifs are devout, sacrosanct

As in my distant childhood

Yet you persist in my present

Hovering afterimage over green alleys, banana fronds

Taro-supplanted drainage lines

Chasm-high concrete pillars

Planted like hands on hips astride slipping valleys

Coin-coloured stones

A phantom in triplicate,

Ever attendant in dressed stone solemnity

Juxtaposed colourful confession

The confidence splashed over the sides of pedicabs

And sprinkled over food,

Bowed heads making stanzas holy.

A house is a house

Is a home, is a workzone

Is a labour. Is love

Faithfully limping down with slops in hand

Animals and dependants bawling

Vines crawling ceaselessly over food

Waiting for a Day to rest

Home is here

Where humidity rises,

Golden in the close din

Of coconut smoke and roosters roaring.

by

Entropy Opposition

In another life I am an ant, picking up crumbs and moving them from place to place.

I maintain entrances and exits. I excavate new chambers and tunnelways. I gather food and bring it back to the pantry. I bury the dead, tend to gardens, take out rubbish.

In another life I am a raven. I calculate time for cars to arrive and solve the puzzles necessary to unlock foodtreasure. I transport golfballs back to my nest.

In another place-time I am a slater, snouting feeler-legged, antennae twitching, making soil from vegetable with my alimentary tubes and tunneling.

In another body I am a mouse, nibbling nocturnal and fastidious, tidying back to the order that I know.

I am a plague-locust, swelling with overflood of food, seeking surplus and never satisfied.

I am an ibis, sway-necked and stately in the rot.

I am putting rubbish into bags. I am leaving the bags here for someone else to deal with. I am wondering who is worse: the ones who are incapable of understanding the echoes of their actions on other life; the ones who judge them; the ones who judge the items as rubbish; the ones who treat them as worthless when everything else is sacred, comes from and returns to perfection and has a use and purpose at every stage, if only it can be found…