FLEUR ADCOCK'S POEM 'INCIDENT'

INCIDENT

 

When you were lying on the white sand,

a rock under your head, and smiling,

(circled by dead shells), I came to you

and you said, reaching to take my hand,

‘Lie down.’ So for a time we lay

warm on the sand, talking and smoking,

easy; while the grovelling sea behind

sucked at the rocks and measured the day.

Lightly I fell asleep then, and fell

into a cavernous dream of falling.

It was all the cave-myths, it was all

the myths of tunnel or tower or well —

Alice’s rabbit-hole into the ground,

or the path of Orpheus: a spiral staircase

to hell, furnished with danger and doubt.

Stumbling, I suddenly woke; and found

water about me. My hair was wet,

and you were lying on the grey sand

waiting for the lapping tide to take me:

watching, and lighting a cigarette.

This is a wonderful poem but painful. When I read it I felt cold with a shock of acknowledgement. I had to hide from myself what it meant to me.

BLACKENED

BLACKENED

Blackened, I am skinned with tar-paper.

Tough, I am crazed like shattered glass.

Castaway, I am rusted iron, cast out.

Outlaw, I inherit the Badlands.

The bitter gourd is what I eat,

The blood of snakes is what I drink

Empty, I am soulless.

You do not expect to find my heart

Not even with your foot

Not even under your boot.

I am the half-child you will not let be.

I am Reproach.

I am the lover who knows you in part

I know you wholly but only in part

I know you are the bad good man

I know you are the good bad man

I know you and saw your guts crawl with fear

I know you and felt the weight of your bones cruelty

I love what I know I cannot love what I do not know

Therefore am I bruise-blackened with knowing and love

But you don't see my heart.

You see only my crazy skin.

18,10.2012 Labatut

PLANT LIFE

PLANT LIFE

First is time.

Then a spatter of white

lichen like bird droppings

dotted on the hot black lava rocks.

In more time

Always time

The lichen curls and colours

coalesces, spreads slow and greedy,

silver, yellow, green and gold.

 

There is time.

Always more time

Thick stems, waxy leaves,

moist-bodied survival systems,

will shrink and hide and wait.

 

Again there is time.

Always time. More time

A dome of delicate Fibonacci sticks

netted over a tenacious lace of roots

retains a green oval leaf and a tiny yellow star.

In time it will be a green half sphere covered with faint blossom.

 

There is more time

Always time and then more time.

The silky, insidious grasses lie down humbly

ground-pressed by wind, seeded heads nodding, nodding.

Grass is life for humans who have so little time.

Sun-blackened, broken-backed by the meagre harvest,

their empty stomachs rage and ache. Soon they will be without time.

“As for man, his days are as grass: As a flower of the field, so he flourisheth.”

For a time.

 

Ruth Hartley Lanzarote March 2014

VOLCANO

VOLCANO

Small cones of flesh

beached on the sand.

The colours of clay

sun-fried, sun-dried,

raw umber, raw red,

burnt ochre, burnt orange,

brown and carbonised black.

Gut chambers

rumble, bubble,

protest, threaten,

vent shit-sticky lava

in white bathroom craters.

Smoked discs on top

cover eyes and brain

that marvel and see,

want to know more,

understand to care.

Small cones of flesh

asleep on an volcano.

It stood up and shuddered,

stopped life with a shrug.

It has no feelings,

no sense of its power,

it does not mind or watch

when we explode and burn.

LANZAROTE

 

 

LANZAROTE

An ocean of black water

deep and world-wide,

its edges tear into

a thin white frill.

Black lava-dust hills

rise up and over

a white scum of houses

at the water's edge.

Birds skimming waves

spin on a wing-tip

from white to black

then black to white

stitching the sea's hem.

White sails curve

half of a parenthesis

hollowed by black winds

out of an empty sky.

So much dark, deep eternity,

such a little edge of life,

the fragile mind clings,

twists and breaks.

MANDELA

1

They folded the old man up .

and put him away in a box.

They held the lid down

with the weight of their prayers,

and swept out his dreams with the dust.

He remains inside books on the shelf,

interleaved and in marginal notes.

In sticky-taped folders his photos are silent.

His stories just paper

that blows down the street.

The old man has been put away in a box.

2

Is it best to be forgotten than to be showcased and packaged

into relics bought with blood and sold for gold?

Is it best to be gone from the bankrupt world?

3

We racket on noisily, choking up the bright smiling space

with peeps and clicks as we grab and grub at the moving ghost.

With our plastic and silicone tricks and cons,

we constrict and construct, devise our devices,

and vie to own the dead hero's fled spirit

to know he blessed us lesser and more mortal souls.

4

For twenty-seven years

they folded my hero up.

They slotted him through bars of iron

and cemented over the cell.

Danger, danger, danger clanged the gates and bells.

5

I had seen that before.

The white skull of the pulped dog,

frothing at the red on its halo of mad stones.

The crushed snake staring with flat tired eyes

at its own curving skinless purple flesh under a brick.

He left us to our hissing silence

to peep through hooded eyes

Don't think, don't speak, don't see.

6

From the white death I was bequeathed I wanted a black angel to save me but

he was not an angel, just a man, and mercy was buried with him on Robben Island, under the grey limestone dust.

7

I was angry with him for turning to the dark side

which was where they said he belonged,

which they said, was stating the obvious.

They said he was mad, bad, and red.

He wanted us dead, they said.

He hadn't saved us from ourselves by riding in

on a storm-horse of purity and purpose.

A laundering hero to whiten us whites

and bleach out our sins.

Somebody better than us

That's what I needed.

8

No.

9

He chose to be what they said.

Terror, black, black terror.

I was angry with him for leaving me

alone in a world without anything good.

10

Then we forgot.

11

We forgot him.

We forgot all about him.

We lived on only in his memory.

We were dead to hope

and to our ideal of freedom.

12

Then Mandela walked out and back with his hand raised.

He stood up.

He came out of the box.

Mandela.

Human.

Hero.

Ours.

CHANGE OF SKIN

My friends won't know me.

I am about to shed a skin and go through changes.

For one thing, I shall be taller and newer

(which in itself is amazing!)

and for another, little bits of me

will have shiny corners and gleam

unexpectedly, refracting strange lights.

Mostly, at first, my awkward angles

will show through more pronouncedly.

Instead of gnawing my knuckles, biting my nails,

and rubbing my eyes half-asleep,

I shall tear off whole strips of skin

which will quickly shrivel and blow away,

brittle as a bug's transparent wing.

I must admit that this time around

I had hoped for wing-buds myself.

Instead I have a knob on one shoulder

and on the sixth finger of my left hand

a claw which I keep folded up in my palm.

No doubt I will find them useful

for carrying burdens and climbing mountains

in my next metamorphosis.

However, with every shrug of my shoulders,

a patch of the new me will be apparent.

Soon I will be iridescent -

a veritable Josephine in a skin-coat of many colours.

Though the rainbows won't last for long

and soon darken to the painful lace of tattoos,

I will have my moment of glory

when I stand up straight in an explosion of possibilities

leaving only a little mound of dust and scales at my heels.

Six unsociable haiku writen too early or too late.

1

Insomnia finds

the night indigestible.

It eats me instead.

2

In a milk-white mist

skimmed from the river, cows graze,

turning grass to cream.

 

3

Married women don't

write much poetry after

midnight or in bed.

4

In an amnesia

of mist, lines of poplar

trees float rootless.

 

5

When the cook has gone,

then the most dangerous place

will be the kitchen.

6

Put your hand on my

thigh where its soft curve leads down

to the door to death.

THE EARTH HAS SUCH HUGE OLD BONES

THE EARTH HAS SUCH HUGE OLD BONES

The earth has such huge old bones.

They elbow out of the frayed fabric of wearied forests

and poke holes in the sky's eyes.

Mountaineers race to be kings of the castle

but huge old bones doesn’t shrug, doesn’t care,

doesn’t feel the spike slip or hear the gasp for air.

 

 

If I was devil-may-care and debonair

I would leave my own bones high up there.

Mere man just dust on the skeleton of the world.

 

 

Time erodes me. It wears away my hair,

my reason, flesh, skin and sight.

I won't be mulch and nuzzle into the valley’s soft groin.

I'll stick my bones on a rock near heaven

where space and earth wonder and collide.

Begun in Anatolia, Turkey November 5th 2008

HEY NONNY-NO!

Hey, nonny-no! Hey, hey, no-nonny!

There's no more wild my bonny!

It's capped its teeth, manicured its claws.

Gone, gone, gone is the red and raw

You'll find it in a beating heart

that last most dangerous of places

and my bonny that's under siege too!

Old Herne the Hunter wears green fur fabric

fashionably bloodless from Red or Dead

while wiley Reynard wears black plastic

and snarling has S.&.M in bed.

The wilderness is saved from wildness,

its safe as houses – not like the street.

Oh hey, nonny-nonny, oh hey, oh hell!

AKROPOLIS

AKROPOLIS

I stand,

substantial,

on the heavy ground

of the thrusting hill.

I am weighted,

solid, dense.

I breathe wind,

I see distance,

I feel movement.

Around me

the Akropolis is still.

It has fallen silent.

Motionless pediments,

horizontal columns

resist the shivering grasses.

There is no substance now

to the vanished builders.

They are gone.

I must follow.

October 17 2008

 

MUPANE FOREST LUANGWA VALLEY 1995

MUPANE FOREST LUANGWA VALLEY 1995

Inside birdcage ribs, my heart

lies empty, crushed.

A speckled blue eggshell is glued

by a red speck to a hostage feather.

Broken. Broken.

Dead branches of an old tree

hide slivers of a glass bauble.

Each silver splinter shatters me.

I pick up the shards that stab,

the hook that hangs nothing.

Gone. Gone.

Pain, suppurating, boils from my skin,

blisters of corrosive tears burn and itch.

Let me go. Let me go.

 

A dog mounting a bitch,

grief mates with my heart.

Eight legs stumbling like pall bearers.

No mongrel progeny from this coupling,

but a barren, bitter sterility.

Alone. Alone.

The funereal heart rattles its urn,

choked with pebbles not ashes.

A flint-stone struck by the dull spade rings

a knell for ears stopped with dust.

My tongue is thick with clay.

Bury me. Bury me.

Deep where sightless eyes don't see,

deaf ears don't hear and I can't feel.

Let me be. Let me be.

 

The quiet, grey rain creeps among the dry leaves

padding at the dust with soft paws

promising - promising - to return

tomorrow - tomorrow – perhaps, perhaps.

Pamona, Pamona. Slowly, slowly.

 

A caterpillar goes in demented circles at my feet,

searching to leave her sackcloth skin of fire and hair

and become a slice of orange sunlight drifting for a day

in a glade of trees with butterflies for leaves.

Mupane. Mupane. Mupane.

*Pamona means slowly, gently or carefully in Chinyanja

Mupane is a common tree with butterfly shaped leaves.

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