Ingrid de Kok

is a girl of thirteen
and her children are many.

Left-overs, moulting gulls,
wet unweaned sacks

she carries them under her arms
and on her back

though some must walk beside her
bearing their own bones and mash

when not on the floor
in sickness and distress

rolled up in rows
facing the open stall.

Moon and bone-cold stars
navigational spoor

for ambulance, hearse,
the delivery vans

that will fetch and dispatch
the homeless, motherless

unclean and dead
and a girl of thirteen,

children in her arms,
house balanced on her head.
...

may the wrist turn in the wind like a wing
the severed foot tread home ground

the punctured ear hear the thrum of sunbirds
the molten eye see stars in the dark

the faltering lungs quicken windmills
the maimed hand scatter seeds and grain

the heart flood underground springs
pound maize, recognize named cattle

and may the unfixable broken bone
loosened from its hinges

now lying like a wishbone in the veld
pitted by pointillist ants

give us new bearings.
...

Thought I recognized the tilt of his shoulder,
hands in both coat pockets,
and the cleft of his chin as he turned
blankly towards my radial gaze.

This happens to older travellers,
footsteps muted in foreign towns
where natives tread their stable streets
while strangers trace resemblances.

There are people visiting the Karoo
who claim it's just like Montana,
and in southern Ontario
find Transvaal shrubs and rocks.

And here in New York, seeing my father
wearing his old greatcoat,
head down, preoccupied as usual,
I wondered what he was up to.

But it wasn't him, couldn't have been.
This isn't the place, the time,
isn't even the hemisphere:
here I know no one's shoulder.

And he's meant to be dead,
not in northern time and space,
turning up here alone,
avoiding my glance again.
...

‘There be of them, that have left a name behind them, that their praises might be reported.
And some there be, which have no memorial, who are perished as though they had never
been; and are become as though they had never been born; and their children after them.'
Apocrypha

Only the rustle of reeds
thin pipe smoke
a flickering paraffin lamp
women in blankets bent over
their faces lost to the light.

And remnants:
gate without hinges
stones in a half circle
afterbirths buried in silt.

Can the forgotten
be born again
into a land of names?
...

As is the custom,
all winter long the wild canary
in its cage inside the cellar
is fed and cared for.
It sings its buoyant song
as if still skybound,
till its notes quaver
and it sings no more
in the damp dark;
not even when the farmer
opens the wooden shutters
for a dose of daily cellular light.

Months later, before dawn,
an early stamp of boots
brings the man to his silent bird.
He lifts the cage, cloth still on top,
and walks towards the woods.
Shafts of moving light
and soil smells strong as coffee
slowly filter through the bars,
till, hooked high in a spreading chestnut
the uncovered cage sways like a lantern
among the buds and shoots
and blue sky feathering trees.

The bird hiccups, tests its unpadlocked voice,
and again, and then soars into song -
calling, we imagine, its lungs to free its wings.
And calling, as was planned, the new-born
and migrating birds of spring
to closer and exposed view.

In the chestnut, pert and curious,
a bird party sings
without shadow or memory,
perhaps exhorting the canary
to find a mate, or explain its habitat;
while it sings back,
a duet we project our longings into,
despite our forebodings
because: there, we say,
are the trees, spring, and the wild birds
and there, the caged one about to be freed
and the farmer sharing the sun beside it.

But the farmer lifts his gun
and shoots as many as he can,
their bodies mostly too small to eat
though large enough
to spasm in the sky
before they fall
and are collected in a bag
on this bright morning
when now we hear
other guns shooting other birds
across the glittering Tuscan hills.

The caged canary,
shocked rigid
by the sudden shots,
smelling its betrayal
in gunpowder,
stops singing
until the following spring.
...