Black vulnerability, black stigma
There’s a swamp in his breath, swampy breath
volcanic ash in his pink nostrils, dragon
The red light from the pale white boy’s torch
touches my forehead
His arms, his body is like milk, a white desert,
a pale sea, it is made up of white sand like whey powder
His mouth is a comma, grief
His hair, a cemetery
Other women like me are buried there
I stare at the page until it begins to melt
I blink until I feel water behind my eyes
The red light penetrates my skin, and then my skull
I hate him. Is it wrong to wish him dead?
Does he hate me, is this why he is doing this?
Is it wrong to want to have power,
enough power to protect myself?
I tell him to stop
He is not doing it to anyone else
He only aims the red light at my forehead
But he just laughs. He just laughs
Something like bitterness, the injustice of it all, inequality,
racial burden crawls beneath my skin,
claws at me, makes me see red, makes me, oh, whatever
I ignore another boy when he speaks to me
His body is the colour of milk, so pale, so white
His voice is like a shout
The quiet in the night sky, in my bedroom
reminds me of the colour of his skin
The emptiness in his mouth
As I walked out of the room, he kicked the door into me
A shadow passed through me
What happened to them?
The boy armed with the red light?
The white boy, the drug addict, who said that
he bought his marijuana in Sanctor?
Was it Sanctor? I can’t remember anymore.
It was a long time ago. It sounded something like that.
What happens in the end to losers and drug addicts
and depression sufferers?
They are not accepted by society
They’re dangerous
They don’t go swimming in the sea
for fear they’ll drown
I remember these boys,
and then I remember Nolan Xavier Wells
Dear God, do they really not care about us?
=====
Today I will write about forgiveness, about having a forgiving heart
My mother
has turned into
a fire hydrant
She waters
the garden
with a boomslang
in her hand
Charles Bukowski
watches her
His eyes, two brown cells
He smiles at my mother, the fire hydrant
But she just ignores him
as if he isn’t standing there
He dips
a rusk
into the tea
There’s a tiny earthquake in the cup
Waves across the saucer
The tea spills into the verdant-green silence
Its perfume
The sound of the hosepipe, water gushing
out of it
Birdsong
We’re all free now, says Chris Hani
Bukowski nods
I don’t agree
But I don’t say anything
George Botha
and Stephen Bantu Biko
play a game of chess
If philosophy is medicine, what is poetry?
Albert Camus remarks
Frantz Fanon
turns his head
in the direction
of the cacti and says,
Philosophy is philosophy is philosophy
Fanon, who am I to disagree, says Camus
There’s a knock
at the front door
It’s another pilgrim
on a spiritual mission
They want to meet
The other pilgrims present
I made more tea
Bukowski says
that he wishes
he had been happier
I remark how well I know that feeling
Anna Akhmatova
and I spoke about the men
that we had loved and adored,
and the men who had left us
We spoke about the women we became
as we lost our innocence
as we grew older
and the springtime
of our youth
faded away
Petya Dubarova is quiet
You’re a rebel, Hani says
She’s a poetess, Camus says
She’s a teenager
She wants to be left alone,
I want to holler
But I can’t seem to find the words
Petya stares into the distance
as if mountains are gazing back at her
Look! The roses
The parsley, the mint
The flowers sparkling
Their mouths, rainbows
No spoiled identity here
No stigma
No fractured sensibility
Yes, no stigma
Look! Look!
There’s Patrice Lumumba
under the shade
of the guava tree
dancing
cheek-to-cheek
with his wife
Look! Look!
My father, my father!
A young man
before he had me
before my sister came along
then his namesake
He puts his arms around my mother
And kisses her cheek
And she laughs
She laughs
While I hand out fortune cookies
And the earth is still round
The glaciers are melting at the North Pole
There is still a hole in the ozone layer
They want to colonise Mars
They still send rockets to space
Babies are still being born in refugee camps
But my mother is laughing
My mother is happy
And my father is a young man
in the prime of his life
It is not too late to forgive you
No, it is not too late to forgive you, my brother
It is like the habitat of mitochondria
Forgiveness is a work-in-progress
It is a process.
*****
Poems (c) Abigail George
Image: Vilius Kukanauskas Pixabay remixed