Liminal hours

An in-between time, hovering on the threshhold between old and new year, letting go and anticipating.

Overheard in the village street, this exchange between a small Cape boy and his 11-year-old English cousin. The clear-eyed truthfulness of children living in a world of lies.

Small Cape boy: ‘Don’t you have any crime and violence over there then? No murders or bombs?

Eleven-year-old English cousin: Well, we’re too busy pretending we’re not at war.

In the hot sleepless hours before dawn I reflect on what it means to live in a beautiful, unbearably lovely landscape tinged by the shadow of overt and implied violence. No answers come from the inner oracular self and so I reach for a volume of Audre Lorde, the Black lesbian poet and activist, a visionary writer I discovered when I was in my 30s and afraid of going crazy, of catching alight with madness, craziness like the contagion that was women’s rage to find ourselves betrayed, raped, violated, abandoned:

The difference between poetry and rhetoric
is being
ready to kill
yourself
instead of your children.

I am trapped on a desert of raw gunshot wounds
and a dead child dragging his shattered black
face off the edge of my sleep
blood from his punctured cheeks and shoulders
is the only liquid for miles and my stomach
churns at the imagined taste while
my mouth splits into dry lips
without loyalty or reason
thirsting for the wetness of his blood
as it sinks into the whiteness
of the desert where I am lost
without imagery or magic
trying to make power out of hatred and destruction
trying to heal my dying son with kisses
only the sun will bleach his bones quicker.

The policeman who shot down a 10-year-old in Queens
stood over the boy with his cop shoes in childish blood
and a voice said “Die you little motherfucker” and
there are tapes to prove that. At his trial
this policeman said in his own defense
“I didn’t notice the size or nothing else
only the color” and
there are tapes to prove that, too.

Today that 37-year-old white man with 13 years of police forcing
has been set free
by 11 white men who said they were satisfied
justice had been done
and one black woman who said
“They convinced me” meaning
they had dragged her 4’10″ black woman’s frame
over the hot coals of four centuries of white male approval
until she let go the first real power she ever had
and lined her own womb with cement
to make a graveyard for our children.

I have not been able to touch the destruction within me.
But unless I learn to use
the difference between poetry and rhetoric
my power too will run corrupt as poisonous mold
or lie limp and useless as an unconnected wire
and one day I will take my teenaged plug
and connect it to the nearest socket
raping an 85-year-old white woman
who is somebody’s mother
and as I beat her senseless and set a torch to her bed
a greek chorus will be singing in ¾ time
“Poor thing. She never hurt a soul. What beasts they are.”

And the great African moon dwindles, the dawn spreads ash on the garden. I go out and pick basil, rosemary, origanum, pungent coriander. Crushed herbs obscuring the kitchen with a spicy green mist that is all summer and bare hot hillside, offerings left on the temple doorstep, pressed on the feet of crumbling statuary, smiles that blacken in moonlight, Pausing at the crossroads in half-light, remembering, braiding and weaving, re-membering and piecing together. The fragment that implies the whole.

Then standing in the kitchen doorway, the worn stable door in two halves, standing there warmed by the sun’s sudden clap of light, sunrise accompanied by hadedas screaming joyfully, birds wheeling over the tipuanas, mountains red as wet blood, light streaming through dense thickets of plumbago, light brilliant as a firecracker. The noisy fierce dawns we have here, sunrise like stamping feet and cymbals, a circus parade. Another day in the light-filled continent.

“I never knew of a morning in Africa when I woke that I was not happy.”
Ernest Hemingway

This long and winding poem, my life

Since forever I have been reading  the poet Rachel Blau du Plessis, the American/Other/global poet producing woman-centred knowledge for an epistemic revolution. Her bisexual androgynous dreamlike imagery of transformation, the price we pay for those transformations. Bitter acquisitions of knowledge, the poisoned wells, the tainted chalice of patriarchal tradition, the search for sources and resources we as women might call our own.  Adrienne Rich speaking of  the ‘dream of a common language’. What sticks in my throat, the harsh truth from Joanne Feit Deihl: “She cannot forget the history of poetry because it is not hers.”

Rachel Blau du Plessis has been working on a single body of work, a long poem, since 1986. Torques/Drafts 58–76, so far.  ‘This project is so large, so hybrid, so poly-generic and intense, that sometimes I say I am not writing “poetry” but rather writing “otherhow.” And so the long Anglophone poem Drafts takes its place as provisional and open-ended, echoing what is unfinished and still possible in our lives. A woman writing  a long continuous open-ended unending poem that is also her life. Writing otherhow.

A woman writing with help from her friends. Lyn Hejinian: “Being a woman isn’t a condition, so much as it’s a motivation, with momentum, occurring at various velocities and with diverse trajectories” Women writing from within and in defiance of restrictive social locations [raceclassculturereligiousoppressiongenderdisputelandlesspovertyhungerrape/ destitutionglobalplundernaturemurder] women ready to revision ourselves in the remnant of earth, in urban migratory realities, in unending resistance, exploring. creating, becoming-one-with…

From Draft XXX: Fosse

Imagine it
without the rhetorics of pity
but not pitiless,
O ruisseaux, o bull of gold and
lapis, the tongue
blue lapis
thick with lyric and wine,
caught in bosky lute trees
caught for song, for song;
the charm that licks your ear,
Bos Voice
webbed one way round with strings
and wound by
linen and pegs. To hold.
Pressured against. The wood
and sinews gut bound
leaned into the plectrum
like a figurehead
drenched by rose.

Burning the old year

Sitting around wood-burning fires  at night under wild stars. Letting the old year burn, anticipating the year to come.

by Naomi Shihab Nye

Letters swallow themselves in seconds.   

Notes friends tied to the doorknob,   

transparent scarlet paper,

sizzle like moth wings,

marry the air.

 

So much of any year is flammable,   

lists of vegetables, partial poems.   

Orange swirling flame of days,   

so little is a stone.

 

Where there was something and suddenly isn’t,   

an absence shouts, celebrates, leaves a space.   

I begin again with the smallest numbers.

 

Quick dance, shuffle of losses and leaves,   

only the things I didn’t do   

crackle after the blazing dies.

Your stripe on my face

The world stolen from them by force. How the Khoisan (Bushmen) communicated with wildlife, found here:

“The Bleeks recorded one of the most interesting thing about the Bushmen: their awareness of the animals around them….They felt animal ‘messages’, they told the Bleeks, messages which were within their bodies, a tapping within that heralded the approach of game and which was never false. A man would feel a tapping at his ribs and know the springbuck were coming, for what he was feeling in his ribs was the black hair on the sides of the springbuck. ‘I feel the springbuck sensation,’ he would say.

I still remember my feeling of incredulous fascination at first reading in Bleek’s ‘Bushmen Folklore’ of this strange awareness. ‘We have a sensation in our feet, as we feel the rustling of the feet of the springbuck with which the springbuck come, making the bushes rustle. We feel in this manner, we have a sensation in our heads when we are about to chop the springbuck horns. We have a sensation in our face on account of the stripe on the face of the springbuck.’

Then we were two

Breaking news, ahem, found here. Of course, we each know deep down that we were and are all Many and One.

Scientists say an entirely separate type of human identified from bones in Siberia co-existed and interbred with our own species. The ancient humans have been dubbed “Denisovans” after the caves in Siberia where their remains were found. There is also evidence that this population was widespread in Eurasia.

A study in Nature journal shows that Denisovans co-existed with Neanderthals and interbred with our species – perhaps around 50,000 years ago.

An international group of researchers sequenced a complete genome from one of the ancient hominins (human-like creatures), based on nuclear DNA extracted from a finger bone.

Too little, too late

Tribute to the work of Sabater Pi  on BibliOdyssey:

“I believe that humanity is on the road to abolishing the mistreatment of animals, but when it finally makes it into legislation, there will not be any animals left in the wild to protect.”

Lunar eclipse of Full Moon in Gemini

Like a  black magnolia, the luminous obscured. Winter solstice in the global north.

Out here it is glorious in the mountains, the farm ponds scattered with waterlilies, country roads giving way to drifts of red canna lilies and blue agapanthus. With the summer heat comes the craziness, the brawls and mindless overspend in shopping malls, highway fatalities, a tide of violence and family torment. The Gemini/Sagittarius polarity, some might say. Other would speak of the ongoing cultural insanity of the hate-fest we call Christmas. Did I mention that numerous emails and posted messages have gone awry with Mercury in retrograde?

It is time for change: the mutable signs Gemini, Virgo, Sagittarius and Pisces are in creative rebellion. And each of us longs for, hungers and thirsts for the still point of the turning wheel signified by the Solstice. May it be so. Out here at night I stand and look up at the constellations of the Southern Cross wheeling overhead  like white fireflies, grounding myself at the tip of Africa. In stillness there is transformation, the pause between dance and flight, the giftedness of silence.The galaxies overhead roar like a blazing white furnace but I am overwhelmed with quiet. Magnolia moon swelling into blossom.

A blessed and peaceful Solstice to all my friends both north and south.

Shall I preach to the birds?

Another lonely island. This poem by David Wheatley, introduced by Carol Rumens in the Guardian.

St Brenhilda on Sula Sgeir

My brother St Ronan gave me
the first fulmar of spring, but when
he praised my legs as I prayed

something screamed louder
than a storm beach of seals,
touched closer than the snugness

of a bed among rocks. I would not
have it: set sail, becoming
the flat earth’s edge, living on guga

and cress, telling my prayers
by the light of a cormorant lamp,
its pentecostal tongue

its own wick. In its oily glare
nothing is illuminated.
Shall I preach to the birds?

I have seen the fork-tailed petrels
walk on water. It is no wonder
the miracle would be to see them

walk on land: a dozen yards
from shore they are wrecks,
lost for want of the ground

giving way. What, if I preach
to the birds, should I promise them
more than they have? The petrels

nest on the waves, an egg
under each wing. Fall
and ascend. I go down

easy into the earth, rise
again to the wispy tuft
of a shag’s nest under

my picked-clean ribs.

Dioramas from the post-apocalyptic world

Tiny detailed dioramas that artist Lori Nix designed for her post-apocalyptic vision. She built the 3-D scenes in her living room on nights and weekends with the help of an assistant, with each one taking anywhere from two to fifteen months to complete. Nix then shot the dioramas on normal 8×10 film, making her minuscule creations — about 20 x 24 x 72 inches small — appear nearly indistinguishable from full-size scenes. Nature crunches the empire.

Some people live on a lonely island

 

The occasional longing to be elsewhere, right in the middle of a cloudy sea. Between Africa and the Arabian peninsula, the Socotra islands off the coast of Yemen. Sitting between a barrel-trunked cucumber tree and a dragon’s blood tree seeping vermilion sap.  Holding up a clam shell to my ear and hearing the news from far away.