From the English-Somali poet Warsan Shire:

The Letter My Mother Would Have Written Had She Known English

Dear Daughter

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

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.’

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

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.

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

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.”

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.’

The woman poet, mystic, writer in a time of war. The woman who has bonded with nature staring into the machine, the furnace of bombing.

I’m thinking of the extraordinary and almost forgotten Welsh poet Lynette Roberts.

“She danced me to the edge of the cliff 

Broke my heart into a thousand birds

And then leaping off without a word 

She taught them to fly.”

She was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina in 1909 into a Welsh expatriate family. She comes to London as a young woman to study at the School of Arts & Crafts, then moves to Wales to paint and write poetry. She marries the poet Keidrich Rhys and  lives in Llanbri. She is attracted to the war poet Alun Lewis. Robert Graves dedicates The White Goddess to her because she has provided much of the Welsh mythological material.

She has a juicy sardonic tongue, a quick grasp of the passionate war between men and women, women and the machine. She looks back to the Modernist Mina Loy, a bohemian woman poet eking out a living on the Left Bank of the Seine, to the lyric visionary HD, to impoverished alcoholic Hart Crane dreaming of bridges, city towers and ocean crossings, to the Mabinogian. She is Other, a foreigner who still thinks in hot-blooded Spanish as a mother tongue. She is Welsh to the bone, to the marrow.

If you come my way that is . . .
Between now and then, I will offer you
A fist full of rock cress fresh from the bank
The valley tips of garlic red with dew
Cooler than shallots, a breath you can swank

in the village when you come

She is writing and  suffering in Wales through the Second World War. Children from the East End of London have been evacuated out of the Blitz to village homes and there is no room to take in Welsh children once Swansea is bombed. She hates the English, her poem’s hero airman is Jewish.  She sees Swansea blazing on the horizon. Her life is ‘dylanesque’ by which she means poverty-stricken.

Her lover is away at war. Men fighting dying, crashing, burning. While she sits over a Singer sewing machine:

Sandals and swimsuit lungs naked to the light,
Sitting on chair of glass with no fixed frame
Leaned to the swift machine threading over twill:
‘Singer’s’ perfect model scrolled with gold,

Chromium wheel and black structure, firm on
Mahogany plinth. Nails varnished with
Chanel shocking! Ears jewelled: light hand
Tipped with dorcas’ silver thimble tracing thin
Aertex edge

She writes of the gleam of chromium, of ’sprockets of kale’, she links birds, planes and angels as mechanized hybrids. She entitles her great Modernist war epic Gods with Stainless Ears. Her metaphors are cinematographic, archaic, alienated. A woodpecker becomes a dragon becomes a helicopter. Who in post-war Britain could hear this new bright voice, glittering with cognitive dissonance and anguish? She stands at the burning point where myth encounters the futuristic, the hillside rendered soulless. Scenes and visions jitter before her eyes like a newsreel.

In 1956 Lynette Roberts is hospitalised with a nervous breakdown and diagnosed as schizophrenic. She lives in poverty around Carmarthen Bay near Swansea, repeatedly hospitalized, until her death in 1995. She has become a Jehovah’s Witness and is shunned by her neighbours. In her last months, she speaks in Spanish and nobody can understand her.

To-day the same tide leans back, blue rinsing bay,
With new beaks scissoring the air, a care-away
cadence of sight and sound, poets and men
Rediscovering them. Saline mud
Siltering, wet with marshpinks, fresh a slime stud

Whitening the fields, gulls and stones attending them;
Curlews disputing coverts pipe back; stem
Plaintive legs deep in the ironing edge, that
Outshines the shale, a railway line washed flat,
Or tin splintered from a crab-green cave.

This is Saint Cadoc’s Day. All this Saint Cadoc’s
Estuary: and that bell tolling, abbey paddock
Sunk. – Sad as ancient monuments of stone.
Trees vail, exhale cyprine shade, widowing
Homeric hills, green pinnacles of bone.

A sumptuous deluxe illustrated  edition of the Letters of Vincent van Gogh also free online at http://www.vangoghletters.org/vg/:

‘To express hope by some star, the eagerness of a soul by some sunset radiance. Certainly there is nothing in that of trompe l’oeil realism, but isn’t it something that really exists?’

Reporter Ofeibea Quist Arcton talks about the mass rape of women in Guinea by a criminal militia:

‘Witnesses and survivors say the troops forced themselves on women of all ages in and around the stadium – students, professionals, market women, opposition campaigners – even grandmothers.

Guns, bayonets, knives and other weapons were used to rip off their brightly coloured boubous (traditional West African gowns) – even their trousers.

And some of those weapons were used to sexually violate them.’

At night the landscape looks as if snow has sheeted the dark earth. But it is just the whiteness of the moon blanching fields and gardens and rooftops. Outdoors it is warm and clear, I walk through whiteness like a slip of shadow. A moon daughter going out to smell  the night-flowering Brugmannsia and that lovely small tree smothered in mauve and violet flowers we call Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow.

The full moon in Taurus. Sometimes known as the Hunting Moon that follows the Harvest Moon. The Mourning Moon. The Sabian symbol for this moon is ‘A woman sprinkling long rows of flowers’. A time for nurturing, perhaps.

But I think too of the white bull with lowered head and  shining horns, garlanded with flowers. The sacrificial bull? The menacing Minotaur? My garden in moonlight is a labyrinth laid bare, the paths that fork and twist, the long undeciphered shadows of trees, the echoing cry of the owl finding its own pathways across the currents of air over the fields and forests. There are sightlines that can be traced  across Otherness and Here, flickers and glimpses. A world at night, denuded of that paltry human element, complete unto itself.

The moon with lowered head, a radiant white bull cantering across the whiteness of veld.