No daughters and sons have I although
I am still a lover of other mothers’ children.
I delight in them. I have discovered I can
Do clever things with my hands. Artistic things.
Instead of braiding hair I can intuitively thread words.
They are my fish. It is no longer winter here.
I am no longer a guest in my own country
I praise your silence and the personal space
You left behind and I feel the tightness in my heart
I praise you I praise all of you but most of all
I have been left behind in a tunnel into the black
There is insomnia even in a sermon
And electric wavelengths in a lecture room
A female writer journaling away in her diary
But where are the children and the husband
She has none. She is afraid of those words
That those words will make cell walls around her
That those words will become her prison
Winter with its shark teeth that threatens
To overwhelm her every waking thought and moment
She thinks of grief and remembers her childhood
And the fact that her mother never held her hand
When she crossed the road or believed in her
When looking left then right what is she grieving for?
What is she living for? What is she praying for?
Midnight’s children. Children who live under the bridge
They smoke cigarettes as if their lives depended on it
In another poem. In another lifetime, another life
There was a mistake. There was a little obsession
A predestined promise of procrastination that smelled
Like perfume. And then too soon you will realise
That you should not have walked away in that moment
Even though you were forgiven child of God
Child of an extraordinary God stripped of all
Illusion and fear of expectation
And like Marie Antoinette was led to a guillotine
Aren’t we all at some stage in our lives?
Don’t we have to live with our misgivings?
And with being misrepresented, dancing around
Golden laughter in our mouths that we don’t
Want to escape from. We want to search forever more
For that most singular delusion swinging swiftly
I like my innocence and I like my imperfections
I like the fact that I’m flawed and that I’m confessing to it.
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