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
...

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
...