The Robin by the drainage line

‘s more timid than is usual:

its wisping song dissembles,

scuttles unseen through tangles

of desiccated grass and under aloes

till we’re hoodwinked

but the Chats

make up for it. Appearing

one by one through a chink

in a barn’s rotting wall, they

swivel heads – always so careful

of the world   ̶  then transform to a

sudden swift succession; flick

wings, one by one, once settled on

a strand of wire. There’s a growing

line of them   ̶  eight, nine. Ten.

                

Oatmeal bubbles: a whiff

of dagga. Don’t worry. Your

ersatz hunger will be seasoned,

palpably, with salt and butter.

 

The empty stomach of the earth

feeding through its creatures slowly

appears despite a stubborn mist,

floats into your own to settle

there, and stick. But the farm

is of little use these days:

sows its own image onto websites

to supplicate a stream of tourists

 

… there is no heft left in my arm, to test

the blunt axe rusting on its stump.

 

Under the rafters spiders have

hung out their transparent washing.

 

2

 

Grudging heat claims us

not. Though a meagre sun awakens

leans falteringly against the day

 

it’s hard to know this morning why

 ̶  not how – its wan light can be seen

above the mountains; because

the slow, trembling diffusion down

is just a tentative hello, a beginning

to a sentence that none of us

imagine can ever be completed

 

and I can no longer credit here what

belief is mine. Immensities of cloud

don’t dilute dread: I sit beneath

these bartered, timeshared eaves

where biltong swings, bracketed

by marbles of fat

dangles

and flirts with its suitor flies

                                             

or, turning the other way, find

the land undulating away to bring

to sight as evidence

copses, cows,

but also the makeshift houses where

poverty is shy enough to seem

almost to shrug itself into acceptance.

...

Under a mucilaginous sky

autumn sidles up to us 

bearing pandemic.

                              Vuvuzelas 

blare, in praise of the humble,

those who watch the tills,

deliver meals, take away

the rubbish of the rich.

 

A drum taps. Does another?

 

A wind

                or is that a tickle,

starting in my throat?

 

In the suburbs, in the slums, on

highways full of tourists’ ghosts,

in shacks kinfull of hunger, in

mansions gorging to repletion,

we learn, finally, that death is

an easy menu to order, though

there’ll be no meal. Our skin:

an edge of calm before the storm.

Our screens,

that other comfort food,

reduced to a flicker in the corner.

 

Late afternoon’s an eerie absence:              

cars seem to flit past on wheels

of cotton wool, and a silence

masked and not foreseen tiptoes

across the land

                            then rumours,

which are enough for fear. What

ever the cards are we’re left holding

they’re not stacked like plates, with

any care or pattern: so they’ll fall 

as they may.

 

Each single day coughs up

food lines 

                  even as the lungs

of nature start (at last) to reinflate.

 

Outside the window, at my level,

a sunbird in breeding splendour

eyes me, seems to ask:

“are you then all that’s left?”

 

I can’t answer, yet

                           if this landscape

is torn irrevocably, or if its seams

will ever knit us back together: 

whether the fog that frays the foot 

of nearby hills foretells panic: 

but 

I know that plague is looming, 

here.

 

            Nor would the sunbird care:

my species has not been kind to his.

 

(My God, we’ll squeal, “We have

been forsaken!”, as if we could

not have seen this coming …).

(A poem should be palpable and mute

As a globed fruit

 

Dumb

As old medallions to the thumb

 

… A poem should not mean

But be

 

    - Archibald MacLeish)

 

Archibald MacLeish believes

a poem should not mean 

but be (as a dumb fruit,

I think he said)

 

but sometimes I think

a poem must be mean

to be intelligible

 

here.

For instance

my wife seems to be pregnant,

expanding parcel of flesh

in which the bomb of the future

kicks its tiny feet

 

(I write this down to form it:

anneal to husband and poet

in the cosy mansion of the poem

when the outside world is too cold

or hectic to love her in.)

 

But today war has descended on us

suddenly and finally.

Tongues lash out at enemies,

the radios one can buy

goosestep as soon as plugged

their collective noise popping

my speech’s tiny bubble.

 

From this poem

 

the news is I am warm,

and sit in front of a veering fire

which used to be

my house

 

while words’ meanings tick in my throat,

nervously.