Ngwatilo

Teacups

Eleven years old and accustomed to seeing
the Jacaranda trees carpet the hill-side
with their lavender flowers, loving them even
when they wilted and returned to dirt; I still hoped

Dad would put colored lights on the twenty
foot cypress tree outside at Christmas, utterly
disregarding its browning diseased needles
and his fragility, to believe we will be back soon

in a year or two. And the church bells appealing
to the city on Sunday Mornings, the rock
I crashed into when I beat Michael bike riding,
how the letters stopped dancing long enough

so I could sense them that first time I read The Lion,
the Witch, and the Wardrobe; these memories
I store away in the “When there was Home” folder,
as I help Mummy wrap the teacups in old newspaper

—

Change

I return to the scene of the teacups, hedgehog & Jacaranda flowers.
The hillside is desolate.
Only in the thickness of the bark of now very very old trees is life
quick-paced, too busy to stop and worry. Change. In the city
Jacaranda trees bloom; here life manifests in pods 10yrs farther above my head.
I am still small.
The cypress tree is an old man leaning on his good side. The wind
is blowing and I see him lean further, so precariously as if he might break if
the needles, altogether long, thick and shabby like a drunkard Rasta’s locks,
lean too close to the ground.
His creaking bones are audible beneath the traffic noise. I hear them because
I am here and silent. The grass is dead and the last generation is gathered in a heap
at the foot of the hill. No one has buried it or offered last rites, else it would have begun to rot
and become part of the healing. The soil has slid
downhill
It underscores the evidence that soil has limited and receding immunity also.
See with remembering, and new amens on your lips