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