My Childhood Trees

My Childhood Trees

My childhood trees stand tall in the grass

and shake their heads: what has become of you?

Rows of pillars stand like reproaches: you’re unworthy

to walk beneath us!

You’re a child and should know everything,
so why are you fettered by your illness?
You have become a human, alien and hateful.
As a child, you talked with us for hours,
your eyes were wise.
No we would like to tell you the secrets of your life:
the key to all the secrets lies in the grass by the

raspberry patch.

We want to shake you up, you sleeper,
we want to wake you, dead one, from your sleep.

-Edith Sodergran

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the most surprising thing about divorce

Do you know the most surprising

thing about divorce?

It doesn't actually kill you,

like a bullet to the heart

or a head-on car wreck.

It should.

When someone you've promised to

cherish till death do you part

says, "I never loved you,"

it should kill you instantly.

You shouldn't have to wake up

day after day after that,

trying to understand how

in the world you didn't know.

- Under the Tuscan Sun 

Love Letter for the Broken-Hearted and the Lonely

The Pen

The pen

Three days before my father died

I lost the silver pen with my name on it,

a twenty-first birthday gift from my aunt

I'd kept for almost ten years.

That day, supervising students in Khayelitsha

putting up a netball hoop, I came home

to ask to borrow his tools.

We walked round the garage and I ticked

off the ladder, drill, nails and screwdriver on my list,

and he suggested I add a hammer and level.

Somewhere between stacking and loading

the car, I lost my pen without even noticing

it had slipped from my hand.

When I went home late that day,

I negotiated with loss as I always do,

not going back to the garage to look for the pen

in case it wasn't there,

to keep its absence incomplete

so it could come back one day.

In three days

the impossible sequence of death.

I went back

over everything we'd said that day

and the years when we didn't speak

and the reconciliation, almost wordless,

when we walked towards each other with our eyes down

and wept while we hugged.

The night he died

I felt the completeness of loss,

of absence without negotiation,

and yet what was still there,

that moving towards each other,

without looking.

Gabeba Baderoon

A hundred silences