Kirstenbosch Botanical Gardens
Megan Hall
I choose a night walk, drag my dad along, my first birthday after her death.
We’re the family we’ve got now, here in the south.
The stars beckon me, as we walk to where kind astronomers
have mounted their telescopes, prepared to share them even with us,
to whom the idea that the sun is a star seems strange and unnatural.
I lie on my back on the grass, and insects walk up the legs of my trousers
and bite me with small jaws. I am surprised they can open them wide enough.
After the scruffy anecdotes of the guide, star talk for real; real stars.
There are Canopus, and double Alpha Centauri like coupled diamond shards.
I have never met these stars before, nor single Beta, red Sirius.
Small but clear, Saturn appears in my telescope’s field,
a perfect luminous sticker for the ceiling.
Then the moon, with its scarred surface like an acned boy, but bright cream.
The stars and planets are bees in the night, each sun humming,
attracting and swarming, hot in the silent fields of sky.
by Megan Hall
⎘
Anniversary
It burst into the wall above our bed –
a rocket, a bullet, a streak of light.
The wall shook and crumbled, falling away.
The roof took off in fright,
flapping wings of mouldy red tiles.
In the middle of the city, our bed:
dogs barking, drunks stumbling home.
This is where the last two years have brought us:
back to a city street
and you,
trying not to hold my hand.
Featured at The Red Wheelbarrow in-person launch of The Only Magic We Know: Selected Modjaji Poems 2004-2020 on 31 March 2022
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