Sunday, January 12, 2014

Poetry from Swaziland part 6 (final poem)



Untitled
Gugu Mdluli
November 18, 2011 at 1:53pm
Shelling ears of mealies 
Long dried, far from their vast green
 
motherfields.
 

Ping-pinging kernel after kernel
 
Into a red-petaled enamel basin.
 

Absent fingers churn out
 
Thought-images of hot weeks in December
 
spent among trees and grasshoppers.
 
Sing-song sashays through sibilant grass.
 

Ticking and tocking memories
 
Flicking them one after the other
 
Into one waiting bowl.
 

Time held in cobs and rows -
 
A stuttering trance
 
Of dusty barefoot days
 
at my grandmother's.
 

Guava trees wild, yellow-green
 
Climbed, raided.
 
The glorious return home with the biggest, juiciest,
 
yellowest of the fruit.
 

An isolated patch of cropped, cool grass
 
from which we watched night fall -
 
the leisurely sinking of the sun, beyond those dry hills.
 
Then star-studded blackness.
 

The long, wistful howling of mongrel dogs
 
with forgotten names and old eyes
 

Slow SiSwati stories. A candle
 
burns until dawn.
 
A mass of skimny limbs tangled - the owners picked off by sleep
 
one by one.
 

Tick, ping, tock, ping
 
Shelling mealies.

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