Gabeba Baderoon Poems

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
...