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