RUSTUM KOZAIN
This Carting Life
KWELA BOOKS/SNAILPRESS
Nog eenmaal wil ek in die skemeraand
weer op ons dorp en by ons dorpsdam staan,
weer met my rek óp in die donker skiet,
en luister, en al word ek seer en dof,
hoe die klein klippie ver weg in die riet
uit donker in die donker water plof.
– N.P. van Wyk Louw, Nuwe verse
[Once more I’d like to stand at twilight
in our town and at our town’s dam,
aim my catapult once more up into the dark,
and listen, and even as I grow dull and ache,
how, far away in distant reeds,
the pebble drops from dark into the darkening water.]
Home
February harvest: Boland
1. The grape picker
Her calves hard as stumps of vine
an old woman heaves a basket
like a hump to her back and hacks
a pearl of phlegm from her throat.
Daybreak. She yearns to taste
that warm and sweet sulphuric wine
and dreams of empty rows of vine:
one tot for each tenth load of grapes.
But the rows hang full and wait.
One foot in front of another
she stoops, bends knees and waist.
Soon, her brown and stick-gnarled arms
alternate to pluck and toss
pluck and toss fat grapes
from vine to back-borne basket:
her limbs akimbo, like broken swastikas,
like vine barbing the still, persistent land.
2. Wine’s estate
The early sun bloats the long drop to such glut
odours clamour over the bluebottles’ buzz.
In the distance, a slit-eyed cock tries to crow
chokes on a crackling phrase, heaves for air.
At ten, the sun slows, hangs just there
like God’s diamond brooch to robes thinned by wear.
Under her fifth basket of grapes, the woman
bends so low over shrivelling leaf
she hears her sweat seep into the ground.
Thirsty, she lifts some grapes to her mouth
and feels them burst like a flush of blood
against her palate
her blood that’s fed the sand.
Family portrait
Family portrait
Aunt Gwen sways, rocks herself to and fro
like a baby, chafes her heart on worn linoleum
in the corner of my ma’s small kitchen
where one-hinged doors hang limp to the floor.
She lives there now. Her husband
imports the latest lover,
keeps her as his
arrears for buildings and new cars pile up.
Brother and cousin Joe have guns
and make babies with one eye open on the door.
Old enough to afford them, they now wait
for a twenty-year-old black onslaught.
Buckie and Mo are doped again on Mandrax.
Buckie robbed a bottle store, implicated
in his friend’s suicide note. He still drives
the neighbourhood, waving at passers-by.
Two children strong, Gail and her husband
still want to finish their studies;
they mention this all while I
wipe braaivleis juice from my mouth.
Sonny’s a school principal carrying joints
flattened in his file. He spins out to a house
empty but for fish tanks, dog turds, double mattress
and a friend’s pregnant wife now his lover.
Ma says, God, she’s switched off,
can’t take the strain of everyone’s problems
as the family close their eyes and stroke
their lashes according the latest fashion.
I’ve switched off too, light candles
and drive whisky and loud music
into me, dancing with my shadow bent
against the ceiling of my room.
Blood thicker than water runs thin
now, hardly holding us together, all of us
flung from poverty, slowly making it.
Home town, 1992
We drive into the mountains, knots left tied,
not undone in the churns I push back,
folding clouds to the low sky. You, two-month
lover, and I. There are no postcards
among the fynbos. When you leave, I can send
nothing but calendars checked for tear gas,
closed gates, and flags torn from school uniforms
fluttering on fences in their own ways.
The calendars are unmarked but for when
we were kept from the mountains
by the cold stares
of foreign fathers. But I wish to hold
on to the mountains as any child should;
wish to drag them behind us in our
endless reconnoitres as you sweep my palms
for mines, finding only words that take us,
two haggard soldiers, to the scarred rims
of our silence. I wish to show you
where I want to stay, die, and become
the mountains. ‘It’s so much,’ you say,
‘my fathers, yours. Mine ran the land
as hunters, muzzles aiming at trees, folding
back loam. Ploughshares, bullets, all from the same
smithy, the only words. These words still hang
over our bare picnic, in the wind on our skins
up here in the mountains, and your heart
that dreams of rocks. So much that cannot
be undone.’ We love each other for that ache.