Dead And Gone Poem by Margaret Alice Second

While I was covering my parasol with shiny black fabric
Marie Antoinette walked in, suitably contemptuous of my
clownish attempts to thwart the sun in warming me to the
nth degree, she is a true bourgeois whose ideas of middle-
class respectability are more important to her than having
fun and enjoying life, with sour mien and disdainful hauteur

She makes it clear that she looks down on me as a low-class
clown, but at least it keeps her out of my space as her dour
face does not often grace the office where I reside with my
now burka-black parasol on the hat-stand and Hanlie smiling
at her desk, although a German contract law monstrosity is
waiting to be translated with the aid of the Internet and this

Menace is enough to drive a saint insane, the Department's
unable to provide modern technology so started a campaign
to hound all employees checking our coming and going and
decorating the Sechaba building with the ugliest cultural art
objects it can find, a "Joseph's amazing technicolour dream-
coat tree" made of material and smelling bad represents the

Rainbow nation, large drums converted to chairs with garishly
coloured cushions represent - heck knows, rednecks - and
inexorably the happy, dreamy days pass one by one as we
talk of moving to Putin's Russia to be cool in Siberia while
offering our language services to facilitate nuclear reactor
construction by means of international communication, but

Let me return to the practical reality of the here and now and
a new Memorandum of Understanding raising the spectre of
failure once again requiring a slow process of acclimatisation
to my being here to translate against all the odds of suffering
from brain cells lost, dead and gone…