“Flexi_non_rangi”

Joan Metelerkamp

for us, like any other fugitive

it is today in which we live

Even then, even in the end

you’ll never know

you’ve got to the end

disappearing like an old man looking up

from the bloody offal of his coughed up lungs:

“are you still here?”

Once

there was

the long time of now

and then

it comes to you as sudden as the swarm itself

sudden swarm through every crevice into the house with

the berg wind

hot in the middle of winter or just-spring

the cloud of bees detonating

against the panes

season of boomslangs and puffadders –

don’t ask why

this should come to you –

in perfectly useless concentration widening

the vision of happiness, freedom, freeing

as the purpose and end – telos –

come like the advent of a child longed for

to pour all your love for

bees breaking free

with the scent of tarconanthus’

camphor,

bitter buchu, sweet of psorolea,

trace of salt wind dropped to breeze off the sea –

free from –

but what to –

not the old freedom of the comrades, comrade,

not any freedom to fight for

no more

“if you’re not for us you’re against us!”

arising like the sound of bees

like the coming of a poem

the smell of bees

like sweaty socks,

under the floorboards, honey, honey,

wax sweating in the planks in the walls, in the walls

the queen

at her regeneration

workers searching

to keep her

making their way

in through the cracks –

Rasta boy-man on the apex of the roof

like an Indian god, his straight back strong,

limbs wheeling free,

stings, thick smoke, smoking out, tar

messy down the roof sheets where internal walls are –

where did the swarm swarm

to become itself

a vast nest, shelter, sheltering

in the wild pear (dombeya) – honey bees, come build

where no one believed

freedom, spirit, scraped out

like so much blighted ovum, old moulded beeswax.

The house burnt now like the ground

to the ground and now

only the chimney like in the plantation, the forest, there

chimneys, foundations, sometimes, still, concrete floors,

(old ones

gone to the city,

trekked to another country)

the place, the whole

hill abandoned.

End: as in purpose: beginning

to see again

don’t throw the tender inception out

with the waters of doubt –

end as in always

beginning, learning again to free

not into Freedom but freer than before

not every day but every day

learning to not restrict

“one muscle one body”

bending not breaking bending

from the top of the femur allowing

the spine its length, strength –

remember the old man, at home,

before his last fall his last

“do you think I’ll never walk again”,

down in the valley, as if it were a decree,

“you are free my daughter”, and again,

as if in benign benison, “free” –

and carved in plain wood on the stoep,

plain for all to see, crest of the family

“flexi non frangi” –

all burnt, all gone, all up in flames –

immigrant,

fugitive, refugee

old, old story

old as the words

you have come to

old as silence you can’t hear yourself think through –

amongst these ashes, now, this foreign

birdsong, these gentle strangers,

this old stone.

Featured at The Red Wheelbarrow Zoom launch of The Only Magic We Know: Selected Modjaji Poems 2004-2020 on 31 March 2022