Gabeba Baderoon

Pa came to collect us from school
in his white Valiant, the stern drive home.
Pa sat at the head of the table,
...

To step into another language
direct the breath
swell the mouth with vowels
feel the jaw configure itself around the word
...

To come to this country,
my body must assemble itself

into photographs and signatures.
Among them they will search for me.

I must leave behind all uncertainties.
I cannot myself be a question.
...

In my mother's backyard washing snaps
above chillies and wild rosemary.
Kapokbos, cottonwool bush, my tongue softens
on the rosemary's other name.
Brinjal, red peppers and paw-paw grow
in the narrow channel between
the kitchen and the wall that divides
our house from the Severos. At the edge
of the grass by the bedrooms, a witolyf reaches
ecstatically for the power lines.

In a corner in the lee of the house,
nothing grows.
Sound falls here.
Early in the day shadows wash
over old tiles stacked
against the cement wall.
In the cold and silence
my brother is making a garden.

He clears gravel from the soil
and lays it against the back wall.
Bright spokes of pincushion proteas puncture a rockery.
For hours he scrapes into a large stone a hollow to catch
water from a tap that has dripped all my life.
Around it, botterblom slowly reddens the grey sand.
A fence made of reed filters
the wind between the wall and the house.
Ice-daisies dip their tufted heads
toward its shadows.

At night, on an upturned paint tin, he sits
in the presence of growing things.
Light wells over the rim of the stone basin
and collects itself into the moon.
Everything is finding its place.
...

Most of the plants in the poem are indigenous to the Western Cape in South Africa.
The languages of the plant names include Afrikaans, a Creole language developed by
slaves in Dutch households in the Cape and drawn from indigenous Khoi Khoi and
San languages, Malay, Arabic, English, Dutch and Portuguese.

Asteraceae, Wild Rosemary, Kapokbos [cottonwoolbush] A medicinal plant.
Halleria lucida, Tree fuschia, Witolyf [white olive] A shrub that can grow to
12 metres. It occurs in forests among rocks on the mountain slopes, and has orange
flowers.
Gazania krebsiana, Botterblom [butter flower] A perennial groundcover, it
occurs on the flats or lower mountain slopes. Flowers range in colour from yellow to
orange and red.
Dorotheanthus bellidiformis, Ysplant [ice flower] Bokbaaivygie [deer bay
daisy] A tufted plant with flat, succulent leaves, it occurs on sandy plains. Flowers are
feathery white, pink or purple.
Leucospermum cordifolium, Speldkussing [pincushion] A shrub that grows
to 1.5 metres, it occurs on the lower to middle mountain slopes. Flowers are orange-
red and resemble a cushion punctured with bright pins.
...

The warmth is leaving
your shirt, hanging
over the back of the chair. Slowly
it is giving back everything
it had of yours.
...

From the end of the bed, I pull
the sheets back into place.

An old man paints a large sun striped
by clouds of seven blues.
Across the yellow centre each
blue is precisely itself and yet,
at the point it meets another,
the eye cannot detect a change.
The air shifts, he says,
and the colours.

When you touched me in a dream,
your skin an hour ago did not end
where it joined mine. My body continued
the movement of yours. Something flowed
between us like birds in a flock.

In a solitude larger than our two bodies
the hardening light parted us again

But under the covering the impress
of our bodies is a single, warm hollow.
...

To judge if a line is true,
banish the error of parallax.
Bring your eye as close as you can
to the line itself and follow it.

A master tiler taught me this.

People wish to walk where he has kneeled
and smoothed the surface.
They follow a line to its end
and smile at its sweet geometry,
how he has sutured the angles of the room.

He transports his tools by bicycle -
a bucket, a long plastic tube he fills with water
to find a level mark, a cushion on which to kneel,
a fine cotton cloth to wipe from the tiles the dust
that colours his lashes at the end of the day.
He rides home over ground that rises
and falls as it never does under his hands.

He knows how porcelain, terracotta and marble hold
the eye. He knows the effect of the weight
of a foot on ceramic. Terracotta's warm dust
cups your foot like leather. Porcelain will appear
untouched all its life and for this reason
is also used in the mouth.

To draw a true line on which to lay a tile,
hold a chalked string fixed
at one end of a room and whip
it hard against the cement floor.

With a blue grid, he shakes out
the sheets of unordered space, folds
them into squares and lays them end on end.
Under his knees, a room will become whole and clear.
...

Every Sunday when I was young,
the whole family crowded into cars to visit
my aunt who lived as far away as banishment.

Led by my grandparents in their white Vauxhall,
after the last stretch of gravel track, barely
wide enough for a car and impassable
in heavy rain, we always arrived
in the narrow road in front of the house ready
for lunch and my aunt's loud welcome.

And later, in that order of things
that has to do with Sundays,
and the way old men understand time
and children, my grandfather in his bowtie
and black felt hat would call the children
of the neighbourhood to his Vauxhall,
and they would crowd
into the back seat from one side
and lever onto one another's laps
and shut the heavy door with a bang.

The visiting children would stand at the kerb
and watch him drive to the end
of the road and manoevre the car around.
Slowly my grandfather would pull up again
at my aunt's house, and a fan of children,
would spill out of the back seat.

All my life I have remembered
the order of such Sunday afternoons.
Even now, recalling
the moment they drove away from us,
my head rears back
at the return of something.
In our watching and waiting
was the beginning of recognition and loss,
of apprehending something
we didn't even know we had.

i
...

Pulling into the station, our trains pause
and I catch your eye across everything
that separates us. I wait to leave but, in a moment
of stillness, I hold your gaze.

Do you too feel that every journey
takes you in larger circles away from home.
For a moment, though soon we will move
in opposite directions, it feels
as though I have come to rest.

i
...

I used to live in a small room
with a narrow bed
and a television at my feet.
A mirror hung on the back of the door.
I lived in the order
of its smallness.

I lie here next to you
and feel the distance
from the walls.
If I held you closer
we would fit
onto a narrow bed.
...

I run down the airport corridors
willing time to be still,
and, impossibly, catch the flight.
I sleep all day and in the evening walk
to the twilight waiting by the lake,
my body a heavier part of the dusk.

The lake looks obsidian turned
to slate by sudden rain
droplets widen into momentary
silver mouths under the jetty
the glint of insects on the reeds scattered
like sequins on the thickening fall
solo violin of a gull call -
moments bearing no notation.
...

I walk in a winter midnight
and my coat catches
snow like a spray of glass slivers.
At the corner, water pipes melt
a straight line of snow under the street.
A frozen waterfall by the roadside stretches
ice into taut strings.
Our footprints traced back to the door -
movement made visible.

i
...

In transit in Frankfurt airport halfway
through her journey to America,
she waits in the sheared hours of the morning
before the grey stalls open.

At the end of the corridor where
the phones stand back to back she presses
into a booth and dials the long number for home.

The delay in the call is one beat too long,
enough to jerk apart the words.
Is that you? Where are you now?

She hears the voices she has left and realizes,
where she is going she knows no one.
As the phone card marks the passing of silence,
she sinks to the floor
through the open borders of the self.

Then there is time only to say,
I am fine. I leave in an hour,
and step into the irreversible day.
...

We lose
even our loss.

At the funeral of a young woman aged 25,
death is everywhere.
We walk past the small house of her coffin
lay a single white carnation
by her photograph
and feel alone again,
an aloneness that is a curtaining of the self,
when the lights go out in the house
and the fire stills.

I touch the back of the young woman's mother
and hold her long in my arms.
When I let her go, she bends double,
shakes her head, needing to stiffen
against the loneliness that follows holding.
Only the body knows,
the back that bends double,
the head that turns slowly, so slowly
and nothing changes.
A cry escapes her mouth, but only
for a second. She swallows the sound again.

Afterward, at home, I switch on all the lights
and make a fire
and drink tea, sweet and hot,
and fall asleep with the logs yellow against my back.
I wake to cold
and feel the ceasing again,
and the bleeding of colour into darkness.


A photograph makes its offering of one instant,
but in it hovers the instant just before.
In the photograph, the young woman looks
as though a smile has just faded from her face.

In the morning a bird flies overhead.
Its shadow touches the ground,
the house across the way, the flowers.
...

I glance outside and expect
a mountain to rise behind the house,
sudden granite and trees
in inlets carved by waterfalls,
the air down the mountain slowing
to honey above the sea.

But it is this Autumn
and maple leaves swing on the pendulum of branches.
The oaks with their thinning net of leaves spin
above the house and its flat meadows.
Branches lean into an arched ceiling,
their leaves curved like hands clasped
in prayer.

It is this Autumn
and I will learn its supple light
and you will read to me on the grass
and I will watch your mouth while the leaves fall
and another season turns
on the other side of the world.

And here the trees will draw sharp elbows to their trunks
and a fine snow will tamp down the earth
and Winter will stretch its silence
and I will see the wind made visible
by the weight of snow.

I will learn a meadow is a field made velvet
by Spring flooding, planed by the wash
and ebb of water that levels out the earth.
And I will see the even stories of this place
draw a line to the mountains and wind
on the other side of the world.
...

In my old bedroom I reach for boxes
and the dust of undisturbed years rises
in the afternoon light. As children we drew

our names on such powdery floors. I flick
through high school report cards, forgotten
library books, letters now tearing and flaking.

My hand pauses on an envelope, sealed but unsent.
On the front, the name of our neighbours,
on the back, above the name of my family, I slide
a finger under the flap and tear open the years.
Inside, I find, on a Christmas card two decades old,
a greeting to the tailor next door, who has since died,
in the writing of my father, who has since died.

How brief and irretrievable our actions,
the writing and the forgetting,
and the lives that unfolded from them.
Opening a letter not addressed to me,
I wonder if I am stealing a gift,
or completing a small, necessary ritual.

In the dusty room I say their names out loud
and place the card again among the old papers.

i
...

I. Accounting

The mother asked to stay.
She looked at her silent child.

I was waiting for you.

The quiet of the girls face was a different quiet
Her hands lay untouched by death.

The washer of bodies cut
away her long black dress.

Blue prayer beads fell
to the floor in a slow accounting.

The washer of bodies began to sing
a prayer to mothers and daughters.

The mother said,
who will wait for me.

(written after a newspaper article on the aftermath of the bombings on
a holy day in Najaf, Iraq)

II. Father Receives News His Son Died in the Intifada

When he heard the news, Mr Karim became silent.
He did not look at the cameras,
nor at the people who brought their grief.
He felt a hand slip from his hand,
a small unclasping,
and for that he refused the solace of glory.

III. Always For The First Time

We tell our stories of war like stories
of love, innocent as eggs.

But we will meet memory again

at the wall around our city,

always for the first time.
...

On my desk is a photograph of you
taken by the woman who loved you then.

In some photos her shadow falls
in the foreground. In this one,
her body is not that far from yours.

Did you hold your head that way
because she loved it?

She is not invisible, not
my enemy,
nor even the past.
I think
I love the things she loved.

Of all your old photographs, I wanted
this one for its becoming. I think
you were starting
to turn your head a little,
your eyes looking slightly to the side.

Was this the beginning of leaving?
...

The taste of blood never too far
the metallic salt of it
grit in the mouth
eyes watchful
heavy as bruises.
...