A Hundred Silences. Gabeba Baderoon

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СКАЧАТЬ soft, private laugh.

      9. How not to stop

      How not to stop

      Pa came to collect us from school,

      the stern drive home.

      Pa sat at the head of the table,

      not talking at supper.

      Pa stood in the driveway with his back to us,

      throwing seed into the wind

      with quick slings of the hand, drawing

      the pigeons as though he’d called them.

      Pa carved his own domino set;

      on weekend games sly as chess, slapping

      the final piece on the wooden table.

      Pa drove us home past the house he built,

      from which his family was removed in ’68,

      never looking again in its direction.

      Pa bought his leaf tea and hard cheddar

      from Queen Bess supermarket,

      down the street from their old house.

      Pa rehearsed how not to stop, not to get out

      and walk to the front door he made.

      10. Filming swans

      Filming swans

      You wade barefoot into the water at sunset

      while the swans dip their necks

      like crochet hooks into the sea.

      The clouds turn red

      and this is too beautiful to write

      but it is the order of things.

      The line of wet around the thighs of your jeans,

      the tide and wind in opposite directions,

      cross-stitching the sea.

      The swallows darting after mosquitoes,

      gulls flying straight above the swans,

      the sun’s slow dipping,

      each in their circle, and you and I watching.

      11. Landscape is passing into language

      Landscape is passing into language

      My grandfather was the first

      to build his house on this vlei,

      the call of frogs measuring the evening.

      This was the wild around which

      my grandfather made a fence,

      my grandmother a garden.

      Everything from the kitchen went

      into the compost

      except lemons and oranges,

      the soil already too acid

      for roses to grow.

      Now the sounds are gone

      and the landscape is passing into language.

      A cement canal directs the river.

      Only the high school carries the name Groenvlei.

      Few people remember the sounds of night

      as frogs and silence.

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