blue of the depth upon depth of flowers

 

The poet and mystic HD, from Eurydice:

 

Fringe upon fringe

of blue crocuses,

crocuses, walled against blue of themselves,

blue of that upper earth,

blue of the depth upon depth of flowers,

lost;

 

flowers,

if I could have taken once my breath of them,

enough of them,

more than earth,

even than of the upper earth,

had passed with me

beneath the earth;

 

if I could have caught up from the earth,

the whole of the flowers of the earth,

if once I could have breathed into myself

the very golden crocuses

and the red,

and the very golden hearts of the first saffron,

the whole of the golden mass,

the whole of the great fragrance,

I could have dared the loss.

New moon in Scorpio

 

I live with somebody who is pure Scorpio and it is her birthday on Thursday. She will be 68 years old. Next month she is going white-water rafting on the Orange River. Scorpio is a water sign linked with  intuition, sex, death and regeneration. Strong women awe me, and those born in Scorpio are intuitive , possessive , cunning and ferociously loving. Forever young.

This is a time of crucible, bracing myself for the sting of truth, the wound that pierces.  The small golden scorpion with upturned tail, the hidden danger, the scorpion flat under the stone, the dart or arrow that punctures illusion. A time of some trepidation. The dark moon hovering with concealed surprises. I am living through a time charged with power and danger, alive to both possibility and threat.

There are showers of radiant Leonids set to fall from the night skies  on 17 November. Sparks in the lunar darkness.

To catch a falling star. As Marge Piercy wrote:

we lie eyes open to the flowers
of white ice that blaze over us

Common as blackberries

 

From Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Lolly Willowes:

It’s like this. When I think of witches. I seem to see all over England, all over Europe, women living and growing old, as common as blackberries, and as unregarded. I see them, wives and sisters of respectable men, chapel members, and blacksmiths, and small farmers, and Puritans. In places like Bedfordshire, the sort of country one sees from the train. You know. Well, there they are, child-rearing, house-keeping, hanging washed dishcloths on currant bushes; and for diversion each other’s silly conversation, and listening to men talking together in the way that men talk and women listen. Quite different to the way women talk, and men listen, if they listen at all. And all the time being thrust down into dullness when the one thing all women hate is to be thought dull.

Dreaming full tilt

I’m dreaming brown rivers, taken at the flood. More here. And I’m dreaming about the night skies over Africa.

Marguerite Duras:

“I can’t really remember the days. The light of the sun blurred and annihilated all color. But the nights, I remember them. The blue was more distant than the sky, beyond all depths, covering the bounds of the world. The sky, for me, was the stretch of pure brilliance crossing the blue, that cold coalescence beyond all color. Sometimes, it was in Vinh Long, when my mother was sad she’d order the gig and we’d drive out into the country to see the night as it was in the dry season. I had that good fortune- those nights, that mother. The light fell from the sky in cataracts of pure transparency, in torrents of silence and immobility. The air was blue, you could hold it in your hand. Blue. The sky was the continual throbbing of the brilliance of the light. The night lit up everything, all the country on either bank of the river as far as the eye could reach. Every night was different, each one had a name as long as it lasted. Their sound was that of the dogs, the country dogs baying at mystery. They answered on another from village to village, until the time and space of the night were utterly consumed.”

Dreaming in a kind of topsy-turvy balance. Image found here

.

 

The letter my mother would have written had she known English

 

From the English-Somali poet Warsan Shire:

The Letter My Mother Would Have Written Had She Known English

Dear Daughter

The women in our family are known for their lucid hearts
For the frightening vigour with which they love
And they way they let men eat from their open chests
As if their insides alone could offer redemption
As if their flesh could create portals for men to escape
The ugliness that they themselves created in this world.

If I could do it all again
I would’ve raise u in the sergenti
Where we could face east five times a day together and pray
Where the simple things would leave me enough time to tell you how much I love you
Daughter, I would raise you with my knees and fingertips
Small mercies would make u pious and all my children would love me more
Our faces would be ash covered
Hair laden with the winds of the harmattan
Your father would see the beauty in me that can only exist when he looks at me
And my stretch marks would be worth it all.

But this reality is not in shades of pink
Like the dolls with the fake smiles that you would
Point at, and I would say inch Allah
Knowing that I could never afford them.

In Africa I was so beautiful

On the plane here

My husband stopped seeing me.

Here I would be compared to a woman with blue eyes

And a clitoris

Here,

I am not beautiful

Here I’m sorry

Here you can leave a wife and two children
And income support and child benefit
Can take the fathers place at the kitchen table.

I wish I had held you when your father left

But the insides of my ribs were still dented

And to touch you would’ve

Been as painful as love itself.

I want to leave you with more than empty picture frames

And moments that could be classed as Kodak if they had ever taken place

But this countries weather had the ability to sink into the bone of you

You learn that being an asylum seeker will mean u have malaria instead of the flu.

I know the taste of translation
And if my lips own any hesitation
It’s because semantic and lexis has us separated
In Somali syllables are soft
So they can’t solidify all the things
We have left unsaid

Perhaps the fact that you think in English
Is proof enough that we have a gap
Wider than the tongue and tooth
You wanted us to be.

I taught you
To be proud of your religion
And pray for your brothers at Guantanamo bay
Never fight a woman for a man
And make sure that love exists through actions
Not plans

Wash your under wear every night and watch out for
Demons who dance on your back if you sleep on your chest
To be afraid of the in-betweens and call in children at Maghreb
Make sure windows stay closed after sunset

To shudder
When a shoe is turned upside down
And what prayers to read before entering the bathroom
And leaving the house
And how u should never answer to a voice you can’t see
Calling your name
Even if it sounds like it belongs to your mother

That déjàvu doesn’t exist in Africa
Neither does surviving aids
And that men will always say they love you
That trusting too much will be the death of you

That children with faces of old people turn out the best
And adults that like to touch small children
Burn in hell

But as a mother who literally could not help her children with their homework,
That right there is already all my pride swallowed.

I am one of the mothers
Who wouldn’t think twice about burning off your fingertips?
And running with you on my back across borders and through tunnels
Shrugging off shrapnel and bullets
To escape sodomy
And entered this country
In the quest for democracy and found out that
My spine was Teflon in wars
But divorce could cripple me.

London’s skies are above me now
And esol could never teach me enough of about past and present tense
For the many times I tasted love
I would sacrifice them all
For a chance to whisper an English
Lullaby into your 6 year old ear.

Daughter,

How do you say I’m proud of you in English?

Befriending in green

 

Suddenly the summer is here in full force, the beauty and fierce radiant heat. I have been working in the garden and spending time with two Aloe ferox thriving  in gravel and shaded only by rocks. I am listening but  humanly deaf in so many ways. Attunement, the slow move to feeling in animal, vegetable, mineral rather than in human. I have lived with aloes and suculents all my life. The delicate grass aloes of the Zimbabwean savannah plateau, the tree aloes of Mpumalanga, the red and orange aloes of the Karoo in winter. But I am now dreaming of clumps of Aloe ferox in a dry river bed and wondering why. It isn’t a Western symbol of sterility — the dream aloes are magnificent and thriving in drought. The message lies elsewhere and deeper.

And the fullness of summer in the back garden enthralls me. My  little pomegranate, salvaged as a cutting when developers tore down a hedge of pomegranate  bushes, has bright flowers and may bear fruit  after Yule, our summer solstice rather, here in the southern hemisphere. My figs are swelling with green ovoids. Buddleias are out, the Gaura lindheimerei is a mass of white hovering blossoms, Polygala myrtifolia is all out, the mauve  September  Bush. And I have barrels and tubs filled with new herbs: opal purple basil, green leafy basil, thyme, origanum all the way from a rocky mountain in Greece, pungent coriander, a large terracotta planter planted up with a large clump of white-flowering garlic chives. We are getting to know one another: I watch and listen for signs of discontent, yellowing leaves, sudden wilt, bolting, stunted growth, too much desperate blossoming. And beyond that, intuiting the  breathless struggles of roots for moisture, the graceful growth patterns across the season and  any felt discontent with the sandy soil provided, the insect life that may be too predatory, the happiness of bees, the degree of desired sunshine or shade, a need for shelter from the wind. I keep my gardens as close to the wild as possible. I follow Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs for plant communication. When a plant is truly happy and thriving and at home, the subtler stuff can be communicated. A thirsty neglected  plant  won’t want to talk plant ancestors and healing for humans.

 

The best guide online for befriending plants is the awesome Susun Weed. Many of her indigenous American plants are unknown to me but her guides for the safe and simple use of herbs are clear enough.

As she says:

 ’I want my students to learn as I learned, not what I learned. I want them to find their own way and to trust their own intuition.’

Women writing against war

Today is Remembrance Day, 11 November. As a small child we wore stiff red poppies made of crepe and read stories about poppies blowing in Flanders fields. Then I grew up and read Wilfred Owen.

It is also the date, 11 November 1965, on which Ian Smith declared the Unilateral Declaration of Independence that separated Rhodesia from the United Kingdom and set that white-dominated colony on the road to war, the small forgotten war in Africa in which my brother was killed.

From Marilyn Krisl:

SUMMER SOLSTICE,
BATTICALOA, SRI LANKA

The war had turned inward until it resembled
suicide. The only soothing thing was water.
I passed the sentries, followed the surf out of sight.
I would sink into the elements, become simple.

Surf sounds like erasure, over and over.
I lay down and let go, the way you trust an animal.
When I opened my eyes, all down the strand
small crabs, the bright yellow of a crayon,

had come out onto the sand. Their numbers, scattered,
resembled the galactic spill and volume of the stars.
I, who had lain down alone, emptied,
waked at the center of ten thousand prayers.

Who would refuse such attention. I let it sweeten me
back into the universe. I was alive, in the midst
of great loving, which is all I’ve ever wanted.
The soldiers of both sides probably wanted just this

Enchantment and the ordinary

My daily practice is very simple. I do what needs to be done.

I do some meditation as dawn breaks  (no sweat, I’m an early morning person), I ground as I sit on a big blue cushion.  I pay attention to the bare touch and slight movement of breath leaving my nostrils. As I sit, sending down roots and earthing into my own life,  I pay attention to the ache in my lower back, the knot in my shoulder muscles, the fog in my just-awake mind. I listen to birds and bring attention back to that quiver of breath. I notice the rush of distractions: emails composing themselves,  my mind puzzling over bills, dogs barking in the garden. But I stay seated. Staying grounded in one place is what needs to happen right there and then. Sometimes my energy is a fuzzy golden ball that glows and brightens as I sit. Sometimes there are images, insights, fragments and shards of the numinous. Sometimes it is all prayer and adoration and the bowl brimming over with life, the waves crashing onto sand, the wind in trees, the silence at the core of mystery. Sometime it is just me yawning and getting pins and needles in my left foot. Sometimes I am interceding for a friend sweating and vomiting in the grip of alcoholism, or a friend in her late 30s about to give birth, a sister far away in the Antipodes and homesick for Africa. But there I sit, whatever comes and goes. Where you are, there you find yourself.

I am grateful in this life as I age into croneliness. I have promises to keep. After a bath and cup of coffee or green tea, I make phone calls, answer the phone. I go out into the garden before the sun is too high and water herbs, pick flowers for the house, admire birds and tree frogs and geckos. A short interval of t’ai chi, sometimes followed by a brisk mountain walk. What matters is to connect,  my bare feet on wet grass or sand or gravel, my point of balance low, my centre of gravity steady . I talk with my housemate, we eat blueberries and yoghurt for breakfast. I laugh and play with my small dogs. I get down to work.

The mundane is sacred, the secular is sacred. Embodiment, focus, attention, the heart  overflowing. What nurtures intuition? I protest  against human rights abuses and write to organizations, I lobby, I plot. I dream dreams. There are new books to revel in before I have to review them. Images from artists showing work in progress. Community involvement. Lunches with friends. Workshops. Writing alone in my study with house martins squabbling in the eaves, the shadowy green of trees falling across the windows.

Enchantment tiptoes into the midst of my very ordinary life.

Cooking for friends or a sick neighbour. Harvesting herbs. Doing small rituals that stir the blood and the imagination. Lovemaking. Facing conflict and letting go of resentments. Breathing deeply and enduring the pain. Trying to identify that blue and white butterfly hovering above a flowering cistus bush. It all matters, it is all equally worthy of attention. What happens on the periphery is often the most crucial.

Another one to remember

When I’m walking by the Atlantic Ocean here in the Cape, her poems come back to me and resonate with the rise and fall of the green, mauve indigo waves, the icy surf, the skimming of stones and that medicinal iodine odour of kelp. The forests of kelp trapped in the stormy waves.

Ingrid Jonker was born on a farm near Kimberley, the daughter of Abraham Jonker and Beatrice Cilliers. Her parents had separated before her birth. Her mother moved back home to a farm near Cape Town. When her grandfather died four years later, the family was left near-destitute. Her mother dies in the mental asylum of Valkenberg where Ingrid herself will spend months incarcerated. By the age of 13, Ingrid Jonker has produced her first collection of Afrikaans poems, Na die Somer (After the Summer). Her first published book of poems, Onvlugting (Escape) is published to great acclaim.

Ingrid marries in 1956 and has a daughter, Simone. Her father is a Nationalist politician of the dominant white Afrikaner establishment and she fights openly with him on the politics of apartheid. She has affairs with the liberal writers Jack Cope and Andre Brink and has an abortion, then a crime in South Africa. She is seen as a political pariah and battles to find a publisher for her next collection of poems, Rook en Oker, (Smoke and Ochre).  Sharpeville and the shooting of unarmed black men. women and children appalls her.

She wins awards and travels abroad, but her personal life is tormented. Her lover Andre Brink announces he is returning to his wife.

Ingrid Jonker walks down to  Three Anchor Bay, a rocky inlet with a wild sea on the night of 19 July 1965 ;  she walks into the sea and drowns herself . On hearing of his daughter’s death, her father reportedly said: “They can throw her back into the sea for all I care.”

When President Nelson Mandela was inaugurated in 1994, he read aloud a poem by Ingrid Jonker and spoke of her with great tenderness and appreciation:  “She was both a poet and a South African. She was both an Afrikaner and an African. She was both an artist and a human being. In the midst of despair, she celebrated hope. Confronted by death, she asserted the beauty of life.”’

 

This is the poem he read, Die Kind.

The child is not dead
The child lifts his fists against his mother
Who shouts Afrika ! shouts the breath
Of freedom and the veld
In the locations of the cordoned heart

The child lifts his fists against his father
in the march of the generations
who shouts Afrika ! shout the breath
of righteousness and blood
in the streets of his embattled pride

The child is not dead not at Langa nor at Nyanga
not at Orlando nor at Sharpeville
nor at the police station at Philippi
where he lies with a bullet through his brain

The child is the dark shadow of the soldiers
on guard with rifles Saracens and batons
the child is present at all assemblies and law-givings
the child peers through the windows of houses and into the hearts of mothers
this child who just wanted to play in the sun at Nyanga is everywhere
the child grown to a man treks through all Africa

the child grown into a giant journeys through the whole world
Without a pass

The big, the small and the outspoken

 

Why I love Lizzie Skurnick.

‘”I just want to say,” I said as the meeting closed, “that we have sat here and consistently called books by women small and books by men large, by no quantifiable metric, and we are giving awards to books I think are actually kind of amateur and sloppy compared to others, and I think it’s disgusting.” (I wasn’t built for the board room.) “But we can’t be doing it because we’re sexist,” an estimable colleague replied huffily. “After all, we’re both men and women here.”

But that’s the problem with sexism. It doesn’t happen because people — male or female — think women suck. It happens for the same reason a sommelier always pours a little more in a man’s wine glass (check it!), or that that big, hearty man in the suit seems like he’d be a better manager. It’s not that women shouldn’t be up for the big awards. It’s just that when it comes down to the wire, we just kinda feel like men . . . I don’t know . . . deserve them.

The conservatives are right: affirmative action is huge blemish on the face of our nation. And until we stop giving awards to men who don’t deserve them over women who do, we’re sunk.’