Daylight Visits

in hues

glimpsed behind the cypress

azure sky-blue

rich like african skies and water-fresh

salvias engraved in air

and silkness, still

as a light lake of reflection

passively flat, a changeling

in tone from early to now.

windless, calmness clamed

preserved as frieze

I have seen green

turn red in the diminishing

rims, and still the pinkness

of rose insists

like a harbour

of duskness

 

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in which a violin is homeful

in the arms of chords

of violin

which gather me up

like a flowerful

meadowpatch

no space, no gaps,

just the greening

lushness of invention,

and this, after Bach

after Vivaldi, after

sound grew as strong

as a rosa rugosa

reaching out

beyond the fence

 

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Brevity/Longevity

Cornucupia of a day

filled with flowers, hens

and fishless food

on the water’s edge

of escape, we drew

this moment in pastels

and winter sun

in the nest

blew a bugle

from north to south

so that the sounds

of twenty one good

years of growth echoed

across our harbour

turf

 

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Filling in

A midwinter

day in Kliptown

a mix of shanty

town and mining

a place which once gave birth

to freedom

the living moving

in separate ways

all coloured in,

the dots joined

by chance.

A thousand laws

decreed there were only

black or white

or in-between

 

Unofficially, freedom

remained indoors

until 1994

when it came out

around polling booths

in an April sun.

 

Can you fill in

the queue

from there to there,

from theirs to their

to here?

 

A rhetorical question

we are turning

each moment

into our long histories

 

 

 

 

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Rose Music

Rose scented ice-cream

on crimson rhubarb

flushed like the bloom

of a Madame D’Orleans

decadently abundant

like a rococo tune

 

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Baroquing

I’ll go baroquing

in the garden

for the next thirty years

planting  a cantata to chance

as the planet warms up.

I’m walking around

with daisy-yellow

sunglasses, dazzled

just imaging profusion

seeing clearly

that there is only

now or then,

then there was a garden.

now it blooms

again

 

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Towards midnight

I draw the violin around me like a shawl.

Slender notes create pockets of soundless

minutes uncounted for each approaching

midnight. Music clothes us, not age.

 

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