Friday 20 December 2013

CAR CRASH AFTER LEAVING JOBURG AFTER THE RIOTS IN 1987


                               

 
Behind the car is the bank on which I lay concussed while the marula tree dropped its fruit on me.
 
CAR CRASH AFTER LEAVING JOBURG AFTER THE RIOTS IN 1987

I am killed I think.

Breath dustily stilled.

Broken stones against my gums.

Tongue glued to my lips with powdered earth.

On my head a crusted sightless bruise stares

at the sky with a bloodied eye.

 
After the shrieking explosion of the crash,

under the gentle evening sky,

it is so quiet and clear

and without meaning – after.


Stars fall in disintegrating arcs

and the soft fruit leaves

the darkening tree and

thuds to the aching ground and rolls down

and rolls down

and rolls down the bank

to stop forever where I lie.

 
The journey from Joburg was so long.

 
We left them there to die,

old and young,

man and boy,

girl and woman,

in streets of anger,

in police cells,

in riots,

and in their homes.

Lives brief as the glimpsed trajectory of a shooting star,

less swift than unseen bullets,

like ripe fruit falling.

 
It is the season to leave the tree.

It is the time to join the killer night,

to answer the earth,

to stop forever,

to end.

 
It is the season for a man to have a gun,

for a woman to raise a fist,

to pluck the fruit,

to feed the earth,

to turn out the light,

to kill.

And so the stunned bodies drop,

and drop,

and drop,

their dead eyes open,

their live wounds open,

and dust, dust, dust,

in their closed hands and nostrils.


I am so far removed from home and family

without memory on the strange field

by the broken car

in the ploughed bank.


Help will come for me

but not for them

not for them

for them.


I am so cold, so cold,

with grieving bruises

and wounds that cry.

 
At home the people die.

 
Here it is so quiet and clear

and without meaning – after.



Copyright Ruth Hartley 1987



In 1987 we visited Joburg on a business trip. That was the time of riots and necklacing, and police brutality in the townships of the Rand. It was the year that there was a call to unban the ANC. On our drive home to Zambia our car crashed because someone connected to the SA security services had cut the brake line because I believe, of an Anti-Apartheid exhibition I had worked on in Lusaka. I was concussed and thought I was in the middle of a riot back in Joburg. I was in fact in the bush under a tree that dropped ripe fruit on me holding the hand of a Zimbabwean woman from the village who had come to help. It was dark. I blamed myself bitterly for the fact that my husband and son could have been killed because of my politics.

Friday 13 December 2013

BEAUTY TREATMENT




BEAUTY TREATMENT

Embalm my face said the failed suicide

smoothing on anti-wrinkle crème

and peering through stiff lids

at the red-eyed mirror.

I can't be serious about death,

but is life serious about me?

Is it just decay that won't give up

and life's a gravel path to old age?




Keep on weeping on the bathroom floor

at night and creaming

the creases out of one's neck

afterwards with moisturiser.

The end will come the same.

Soon, but never soon or soothing enough.




Whisky and Valium bring sleep to crinkled brains,

but headaches and time-warps in the skin

are not simply smoothed away.




Ruth Hartley 1976








Saturday 7 December 2013

ROBBEN ISLAND FROM DISTRICT SIX 1965


ROBBEN ISLAND



Morning soothes the cold sea

with yellow fingers of light

bandaged with mist.

Lost in the limbo of old storms

the gulls cry and float

like ashes from a dying fire.



Bare, still, blue, in the quiet sea,

the island rides serenely.

A flattened pearl in the beautiful oyster-bay.



But its violence tears the sky

to screaming ribbons which descend

in thick horror on the land.



It is a mountain built over the years

of small frustrations, misery, hate,

injustice and starvation.



Its roots are in the hearts of men

and in their bellies

and its darkness shuts their minds

before the night.



Oh cry out now, you violent stones

for I have heard the sunken thunder,

felt the earth tremble, seen the light in the crater!



Soon it will come – the bursting mountain,

The blood-coloured shouts will blot out the sun,

spill confusion to the horizon and stain the earth.



Ruth Hartley District Six Cape Town 1965

Written as I looked across Cape Town Bay at Robben Island and thought of Nelson Mandela and the political prisoners incarcerated there. A version of this poem was published in the ANC magazine “Sechaba” in 1967 when I was in London.