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.

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

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.

FALLING SKY

Who thought this could happen?

Who thought that the sky

would fall on our heads?

It's not what they said.

We'll be drowning they said.

We'll be swimming they said

In sobbing seas with the flavour of tears.

In oceans of wavelets lap-lapping our heads.

Look what's happened instead.

Its not what they said.

When the ice caps gained freedom

they flew up to the skies,

they dissolved into clouds,

then they rained on our heads.

That's not what they said.

MANFEAST

MANFEAST

My husband cooked supper for me last night

distilling the essence of the feast upon his skin.

 

By salt and smoke from frying pan and fire

he whet my appetite for subtly textured fleshy flavours

and the aromatic pleasures suggested by the headiness

of brainy wines uncorked and drunk in bed.

 

I tasted with my mouth upon his neck

a feast fulfilled and others promised.

Skin turmeric smooth and hairless

with chilli lips to burn my cheek.

Skin cinnamon brown and powder dry

dusted with a sugar tempting to my taste.

Skin like velvet, juicy, dark as prunes and raisins

to press and burst against my tongue.

A rough and crusty maleness

textured like good bread to chew

and for dessert, transparent, white, and delicate,

yet strong and slightly sour

so I must lick and swallow while the juices run

in anticipation of pleasures still to come.

My pale-skin English husband has made for me

a gourmet meal of many different men.

What a feast I now desire.

Copyright Ruth Hartley

CAULIFLOWER BRAIN

CAULIFLOWER BRAIN

My brain is like a cauliflower,

round, white and full of bumps.

It sprouts all kinds of growths

that cause you much offence.

There's aphids in its branchlets,

there's mildew it its stems.

Its yellow round its flowerets,

its smell is rank and strong.

Maybe I should sieve it

and serve it up as soup?

Bland and white and milky

to be seasoned as you need.

Maybe I should chuck it

on the compost heap

to rot with slugs and beetles

and feed your garden green.

The trouble is its my brain.

The only one I've got.

I like its plantlike strength,

it is myself – it's me!

My body's for your pleasure.

I dress myself to please.

I'm mostly at your service

but I'll never be a rose.

My brain is not a melon

and neither is it nuts.

It is my foodful thought

and what I am it grows.

So like it or lump it

I am neither food or trash.

I cannot change the season

I cannot change my head.

So here I am my lover,

A woman with a brain.

If I am not your taste dear,

you'll have to shop again.

Copyright Ruth Hartley

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 seriously for me?

Or is it just decay that won't give up

and life's the gravel path to old age?

Keep on weeping on the bathroom floor

at night, and smoothing

the creases out of one's neck

afterwards with moisturiser.

The end will come the same.

Sane, 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.

Copyright Ruth Hartley 1974?

CROCODILE CHILD

CROCODILE CHILD

My child, my darling,

I saw your snout

grow sharp and hungry

when, head averted, you looked away from me.

I know you long to stop

feeding between my breasts

and hunt for other hearts.

I weep and blood runs with my tears.

You begged me to smooth your newly tender flesh

when you cast aside your skin,

but you nipped my wrists until they bled

when gentle wasn't kind enough.

My child, my darling, my crocodile.

Copyright Ruth Hartley 1990? Lusaka

PHOTO CHILDREN

PHOTO CHILDREN

I don't change.

Only the photos of my children

grow younger all the time.

My children are ageless too.

Only their recorded images

alter every year.

The photo children become thin or fat.

They wear braces or smiles,

spectacles or scowls.

Their hair is straight or curled,

long or short or dyed.

In their present flesh however,

They are constant.

My heart holds them so

as my eyes hold them, loved.

Copyright Ruth Hartley 1985? Lusaka

NIGHT ON THE ZAMBESI

NIGHT ON THE ZAMBESI

The mosquitoes have tattooed

my defending knuckles

with LOVE and HATE

and etched the ululating air

around my head with thin wails of grief.

 

 

I cannot sleep.

The round obsessive moon has ironed

my brain as bland and flat

as her mad, jealous face

and gentle dreaming will not stick to it.

 

 

I am the sweating night's prisoner

and the sun's rejected child.

Sleep and my lover have left me

and there is no hope of this night ending.

Copyright Ruth Hartley 1993 Written on a hot night in a tent by the Zambesi River.

Published in 'The West in her Eye. Poems by Women.' 1995

SHREWS AND SAINTS

SHREWS AND SAINTS

There are two sorts of wives,

shrews or saints,

but only one sort of husband,

he who must be obeyed,

not teased or slighted.

Saints of course submit.

Shrews though, must fake it.

I wonder what other role

I could have chosen

since equality is impossible

And isolation difficult.

I am no saint

and I would rather not be a shrew,

but in the end, saint or shrew,

we part our legs and let men in.

It is in receiving that we give birth

and in giving birth we submit

to our children's future

arbitrated by our men.

It seems that we are made to receive.

Alas! The curse of women

for as the New Testament says -

'It is better to give than to receive.'

I would like to be a giver -

though not of blows.

I could be an arbitrator too perhaps?

I cannot find a just marriage however,

to predicate as a possible solution

to the problem of marital disharmony.

Perhaps that is why God

advised men to pull rank?

Pity that it leaves woman as antithesis.

Copyright Ruth Hartley 1980? Independence Avenue, Lusaka

SNAIL'S TRAIL

SNAIL'S TRAIL

Reversing the snail's trail

the gardener's dull feet rub out

the shiny, slimy dew

and make a path for work

to enter the early garden.

Next reluctant dogs and later

hasty children criss cross criss the lawn

so many ways and lead us for the day

into knotted webs of domesticity.

Copyright Ruth Hartley 1980? Independence Avenue, Lusaka

UNINHABITED FACE

UNINHABITED FACE for FMH February 1990

Uninhabited face.

Uninhabited.

I look at your dead face, the face of the dead.

Curious.

It is not unlived in like a newborn infant

Not untouched like a child

 

 – but abandoned.

Gone away – passed on - departed.

The old euphemisms applied do not explain

do not enlighten the curious absence

of the person – now dead.

The familiar, loved -

and sometimes hated face, known so well,

is not vacant like a room or

like a house empty for renting.

Known too well

so that looking was redundant -unnecessary.

That face is now changed - but with what subtlety.

Uninhabited

and therefore curiously useless

– not even as an empty paper bag

is purposeless - and not you.

Not the one,

not the lost one gone.

Now also uninhabiting.

Part of nothing, nowhere,

unjoined by death.

No flutter in the air.

No sigh left.

Nothing.

Like a torn page from which the writing has faded

there is no meaning to this worn and empty housing

for the soul we could not catch,

could not prevent departing -

it is simply –

uninhabited.

Copyright Ruth Hartley 1990 Harare

THE NIGHT'S FOUR CORNERS

THE NIGHT'S FOUR CORNERS

Ever since I was a child

on a straight bed

in a square house

on a rectangular plot

on a street corner

in a small town

in Africa,

nights have had four corners.

Ever since I was a child

the corners of the night are pinned

to the edges of the world

by the sound of crying.

West, the hungry dogs howl and yowl at lost moons.

East, thin cocks crow like village smoke from dying fires.

North, the only lonely train full of farewell ghosts

whistles and leaves home.

Fuff-fleep, fuff-fleeeep,

asleep, you should be asleep.

I lie awake and feel the dark sounds on closed eyes.

South, the last, first car escaping,

turns a corner and unzips the sky

so the naked pale morning flesh of day is seen

and the pitch of tears

which all night vibrated silently

is altered and made cicada shrill as day.

Then the cold prickles on my skin.

Eyelids are barricades against a dark world.

No one else is waking, there is

just the silence of crying.

To the empty world's distant edge no one stirs.

The smell of utter loneliness

pins a child stiff with terror,

on a straight bed at the night's centre.

I was too small to inhabit night's lonely void.

I still am.

The night has four corners

pinned to the edges of the world by crying.

Copyright Ruth Hartley perhaps 1979 after listening to the sounds of the night in Lusaka and recalling a childhood in Harare with the same sounds.

AUTUMN MORNING

AUTUMN MORNING

When the alarm’s blood curdling cry

caesars open the womb of the bed

I am born into the darkness of night.

When uncomfortable day squints

from its perch on the western street light

I open my ears and hear the sound

of car engines shifting in the direction of work.

When the sun reluctant with excuses

sticks it neck out of the east I

close up my dreams.

I must make a late start

to yet another winter.

Copyright Ruth Hartley 2012 Work in progress.

HEN GHOSTS

HEN GHOSTS

I must let the ghosts of my hens out of their coop.

They are quite safe from foxes now

and very pleased to have company

clack clack they say

as they run across the lawn

on clockwork drumsticks

in aprons with pockets

clack clack they say

Eggs! Eggs! Eggs!

If I had eaten them myself

perhaps they wouldn't haunt me?

Copyright Ruth Hartley February 2013 Work in progress.

CROCODILES AND TEARS

CROCODILES AND TEARS

(A NIGHTMARE ABOUT WARMONGERS)

I dreamed last night of crocodiles and tears.

Not the tears of crocodiles,

but tears that fill the pools

where the great beasts lie.

In my sleep the crocodiles slid towards me

on skateboards out of the oily water

silent and smooth

thick as dreams and smiling.

Like blind and tongue-less terrier dogs

with slowly wagging tails they smiled,

but not like dogs, or even wolves,

for suddenly they raised themselves

on tiptoe and ran at me so fast

taking my most precious

in their yellow throats

and leaving me with tears.

Then round and round backwards

thrashing in the water,

unwinding tailwards

like giant screws reversing,

they drowned the most weak and delicate

of my hope's children.

Drowning them with such tremendous

energetic uselessness,

killing all constant calm

but tears, tears, falling on and on

into the shame-filled water

where they have returned

to hate and history.

In quiet and secret places,

in safe homes, in old countries,

fear lies there too submerged.

Here are other men like crocodiles,

cold reptiles, suspended

in a bloodwarm, tearful element

that nurtures them until they maim and kill

and we are left to weep and weep

such endless, unforgiving tears.

Copyright Ruth Hartley

Lusaka 1987? A nightmare after years and years of bush wars and violence.

THE DIFFERENT STROKES OF BIRDS

THE DIFFERENT STROKES OF THE BIRDS

The different strokes of birds in the sky

define the air and shape the space.

Each one is like a marker in a book

or underlining on a page giving

meaning and truth to to time and

point and reason to the world.

Hornbills dip into knives and

glide into paper planes,

while sparrows fall like dry leaves.

Waxbills are pulled by swift

invisible strings into trees.

Doves' wings settling are a hushed prayer

and leaving a spoken blessing.

Wagtails flicker and bow in broken light.

The claplark drums unseen

in a season of promise.

Owls and eagles soothe and smooth

the wind with wings of power.

No human gesture marks history

with favour.

It seems we only scar the souls

of those we love.

Copyright Ruth Hartley

Lusaka 1980s?.

SPILT BEADS

SPILT BEADS

The words spill out of me like tumbled beads.

They won't lie flat like prose

or sit tidily on the page and

observe the margins:

so though I don't know anything

about pentameter or rhyme

they might perhaps be poetry?

Copyright Ruth Hartley

Lusaka long ago.

NOTCHES

NOTCHES

I must make notches in my days

because I cannot bear this slide towards infinity.

I must chip a little wedge from mundane chores,

indent the grass on sunny lawns,

slice a little feeling from a glance,

fold down the corners of a conversation,

and wrap my fingers round a curl of smoke.

.

Copyright Ruth Hartley

Written in Lusaka – I don't know when – there was no notch in that day though less slide.