On Days Such as This

Gail Dendy

• Publisher: Botsotso Publishing
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781990922510
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Poesía africana

From the unusual opening poem (conflating birth with a car crash) to its close (an abandoned suitcase representing an entire lifetime), this book weaves its stories backwards and forwards through time and place. There is insight, sensuality, reflection, surprise, and humour as discovered through various personae - be it a tender mother, a heartbroken widow, or a male poet wrestling with writer's block, as well as in objects such as an old chest of drawers, a bronze-age trumpet, or a piece of string. This compelling collection demonstrates technical and linguistic mastery and genuine philosophical depth. In language that is a joy to read, the poems illuminate the capacity for love, loss, hope, and passion which exists in each and every one of us.

I

Birth as a Car Crash

The damp on the side windows blocks the view.

The car won’t start. I’m stranded, lost.

The mechanic’s hardly more than a boy.

He leans with one hand on the door handle,

the other, imprinting itself on the roof, reminds me

if you feel something catch, change down.

He slaps the roof twice and steps back,

gives me permission to leave.

The road is a dying meteor behind me.

In my rear-view I see my life approaching

at high speed. Crashes. Stops. I step out of the car.

I am decades younger, howling, slippery with blood.

I have just begun my future.

Whisker

A single whisker –

a trembling white line

left on the carpet.

My daughter, three years old,

rubs it between thumb and forefinger

and holds it up

to the light.

She can handle what I cannot:

its tensile beauty,

its tapering fishing-rod form,

its pale-to-darkening root,

the itch or twitch

that lets it go.

For the cat, it’s a small lost part

of the means of divination

of space and breadth.

For my daughter, it’s something

to put in her special paint box,

or to forget about.

For me, it’s the humming, buzzing

antenna we all must discover

sooner or later, persistent as

the burnt-out wisp

of a firecracker on New Year’s Eve:

a moment irrevocably gone,

marking whatever arrives.

Billboard: Large Exclamation Mark

It was a vertical slash like that made by a madman,

or a ripper, perhaps. Or that of an artist with a house paint brush.

Or a forgotten sheet in a photographer’s old lab

hung up in darkness, sans the dust. And there, beneath,

is a cosmic hole the size of a child’s head.

It begins nowhere but in itself. It does not end,

cannot be taken by the hand and led.

Trust stops here, it’s said.

The two companions are breached by shores

of pasty white. They swim and call, hope

for a tide to take them past the the rocks, and out. You can

drive right past: the slash, the dot. The unwritten sentence

sentences you to question every why, or what.

The Book

It was the last thing I noted

before Derek responded Hey, lez go

down to the lake for a jol.

He wrapped the book of me

in waterproof skins, rubbed it

till it shone like hubcaps,

popped the whole poem of me

into his canvas rucksack.

It smelled of burnt coffee

and diesel, but I made my peace

with it, and the day was half-

good, I’d say. That night I slept

rough between the paraffin stove

and the empty skottel.

Derek must’ve forgotten

I was there, for in the morning

he buggered off

and I spent three summers

lying on my back,

a sedentary jolling between seasons,

between selves, between

the long and the short of it.

But that was something

that never got noted down,

although it’s stayed with me

ever since.

How to get rid of it,

I couldn’t say. At any rate,

not until Derek comes back,

his hands sprouting prose,

his breath like stitches along my spine.

Selfie

In the selfie I took

with my tablet

(in technicolour, fully HD)

I saw what it is

to be old. Lines that aren’t

there were suddenly

exposed. My skin, once tanned,

was the colour of stone,

and from my stone eyes,

in their blank hunks of light,

was reflected nothing,

the way dead people reflect

and living people like

to forget they could

indeed be old. The selfie

slides back into its tile

of glass. It remains

in perpetual sleep.

I shall not wake it

with the touch of a finger,

or even a kiss. I must let it keep.

Tansu1

Trussed in lacquer, its sheen ripening

year on year, the tansu holds out....