The white gaze
“To create is to live twice.”
Albert Camus
“I used to think the goal was to be loved. Now I know it’s to be understood.”
Emma Thompson
We are kind to each other
The cooking utensil to the other
cooking utensils in the drawer
The spoon to the other spoons, yes, everything
must have its place, every trace
of prey, each invisible doorway
into the kitchen
What is courage,
what is increase? It is only a
place to start
The garden is cool,
the tree’s shade
My father’s voice
I murmur a response
The washing hangs on the line
My brother’s daughter strums
a toy guitar, we have a
butternut pizza for supper
We can’t get the boys out of the angry green sea,
nor can we get them out of the jacuzzi
The white gaze lies dormant
in the shade like our brown bodies
We put a plaster on her finger
the wound is bloodless now
I make iced matcha lattes for myself and my dad
I lick the white moustache off my upper lip
Overnight I have turned into a capitalist
My fingers into stars, my legs
into a wave, the bead of the presenter’s
tongue on the television into a fig
The current moves through me
This time it’s personal
It catches the light of the fire
inside my father, inside all of us
The smell of burning meat, drumsticks
The kitchen is time and memory
Legs are tanned, burned by the sun’s time and memory
The boys and my sister play a board game
My mother screams and screams at me
The room grows quiet
A pink geranium grows out of my mother’s throat
Something within me is crushed like a pill
Slowly the sun in my mother’s eyes
turns into a mocking face, a laugh
Its poison is killing me slowly. She is just a woman
and I am just a woman
The moment passes
The child starts to laugh too because my mother is laughing
I break, I break
A wave flows into me and I lose consciousness
It’s evening
The game continues
A woman walks by the house with her dog
The dog barks
There’s a white feather in my mouth
It tastes like snow
Going
“When we can’t think for ourselves, we can always quote.”
Ludwig Wittgenstein
I offer you cranberry bread.
I offer you this knife for the hard cheese.
I offer you this clock.
I offer you the dark.
I offer you this fruit.
I offer you this orange.
I offer you this as a blessing.
I offer you this sweetness.
I offer you this shroud.
I offer you this veil.
I offer you this truth.
I offer you this memory.
I offer you, Africa.
I offer you these gifts.
I offer you equality.
I offer you this ancient sea.
I offer you music.
I offer you this river.
I offer you this garden as meditation.
I offer you the history of this continent.
I offer you this as an alternative.
I offer this to you for our salvation.
I offer this to you because I love you.
I offer you this because today you are getting on a ship,
and sailing far away from me.
I offer you sleep, captor.
I offer you this forest that I dragged behind me
because you have the personality
of foolish paper and the medicine of the wildflower.
I offer you this frozen mist.
I am offering you this blue cat. Take it.
Please accept it gracefully.
Let it be your companion.
I offer the dissolution of the sun.
And now, now I come to peace.
Now I come to minister to you.
I bring you coffee and poetry books.
I will bring you a pen and an empty journal for your thoughts.
It was Christ who brought us this morning.
It is time. It is the hour of your departure.
I turn to embrace you, to say goodbye.
Waiting/Relapse
“Put down the pen someone else gave you. No one drafted a life worth living on borrowed ink.”
Jack Kerouac
“Today I can’t stand myself, and I will force myself to write because you’re unhappy. So, I must mask the monster within and find the landing place. I must smile because I want to see you smile. I must count the days and remain quiet in your presence, because you are not at peace. This is what I tell my mind on bad days.”
I took a walk and found a poem.
It gave me good advice.
It told me to be kind to myself.
It told me to do the dishes,
to go for long walks.
That fresh air is good for me.
It told me to listen to my mother.
It told me to forgive my father.
That to fix my broken brain,
I had to love myself.
I live in the past.
I live inside this year of sadness.
You, the man, are no longer here.
I tell myself that I’m free.
I have no mother.
I have no father.
I am not a daughter anymore.
I have no sister.
I have no brother.
These days I keep to myself.
Birds inside my head.
Birds kept inside mental cages.
The cold sea is a great comfort.
Some nights this pain is endless.
Tonight, the garden is psychotic.
I have been put in isolation.
The door is locked from the outside.
I receive no visitors.
There are bars at the window.
Charles Bukowski’s ghost sits beside me.
He strokes my hair.
He makes me feel beautiful.
I took a sip of his beer.
It makes me feel warm inside, good.
I hear the women’s laughter.
They start throwing stones at me.
Even this pain is medicine.
Although it makes me feel mediocre.
Strong medicine like Chopin.
I finished the bottle.
I hid the green bottle away
under the sheets that felt like winter
I jumped out of the window.
The slow torture of night catches me.
Mrs Williams, the dead pastor’s wife,
told me to stop complaining. You’re alive
for a purpose: to dream, to have a child.
Live, she said. Find reasons to live.
I read a poem by Kobus Moolman.
I write to the Dutch English poet
Joop Bersee. Nothing makes the
darkness go away. My brother
locks me out of the house.
But first, his fist rains down on me.
I disappeared somewhere.
Once Rilke’s wife, always Rilke’s wife.
The cloud hurts.
The sun hurts.
The snail laughs at me.
You couldn’t even land a man, it says.
How to be great, I ask?
Be kind, Oprah says.
So, I am kind.
The world forgets all about me.
Just like my mother did.
On my birthday there was no cake
or presents. There were no red balloons.
I ate beans and rice in the kitchen
with my father. The stigma is refreshing.
The bones of madness is a gem, trivia.
I went on holiday to Provincial Hospital.
This trip taught me to understand others.
It taught me to understand myself more.
Nowadays when depressed I give myself flowers.
I keep my pain to myself.
Dear Abigail,
Your three poems feel deeply interconnected, as if they form a quiet triptych of home, departure, and interior survival. Each piece moves from the intimate to the expansive, allowing ordinary objects and domestic scenes to carry philosophical and political weight. The emotional intensity is not forced; it emerges gradually through repetition, surreal imagery, and carefully placed details that linger long after reading.
In “The White Gaze,” the opening domestic imagery is striking in its calm precision: utensils in drawers, the shade of a tree, washing on the line, pizza for supper. These details establish order and familiarity, but they also suggest systems—everything “must have its place.” That quiet insistence on placement subtly mirrors social structures. When the line “The white gaze lies dormant in the shade like our brown bodies” appears, it does not disrupt the scene violently; instead, it blends into it. This is powerful. The gaze is not external spectacle but internal presence, resting, almost naturalized. The transformation imagery—fingers into stars, legs into waves, a tongue into a fig—creates a fluid, unstable sense of identity, as though the body is constantly translating itself. The moment with the mother—especially the pink geranium growing from her throat—is one of the poem’s most haunting images. Anger becomes botanical, beauty and poison entwined. The final white feather that “tastes like snow” closes the poem with something foreign, cold, and sensory, leaving a subtle aftertaste of estrangement. The domestic space becomes a site of history, gender tension, and inherited memory without ever losing its realism.
In “Going,” repetition functions as ritual. “I offer you” creates a rhythm that feels almost liturgical, as if the speaker is conducting a ceremony of farewell. The movement from concrete objects—bread, knife, fruit—to abstractions like equality, salvation, and peace gives the poem a widening arc. The offering of “Africa” within the same breath as ordinary household items collapses the distance between continent and kitchen. This makes the political intimate. The line “I offer you sleep, captor” introduces tension into the otherwise tender cadence; it suggests ambivalence within love. The offerings accumulate until they feel both generous and desperate, as though giving becomes a way of coping with inevitable separation. By the end, the tone softens into acceptance. The act of offering becomes the act of release, and the repetition that once felt urgent becomes calming.
“Waiting/Relapse” is the most fragmented and psychologically intense. Its structure mirrors instability; thoughts move quickly from self-instruction to memory to hallucination to humor. The early lines about finding a poem that gives advice feel almost ironic in their simplicity—“do the dishes,” “go for long walks”—because what follows is much darker. The declarations of having “no mother,” “no father,” “no sister,” feel less literal than existential, as though identity itself has thinned. The imagery of birds in mental cages and a garden that is “psychotic” extends the mind into landscape. When literary figures appear as companions or ghosts, they feel like emotional scaffolding—proof that art becomes a form of survival. The line about going on “holiday to Provincial Hospital” is particularly sharp; it blends dark humor with institutional reality. Violence, isolation, and shame are presented plainly, without embellishment, which makes them heavier. Yet the ending shifts gently toward resilience: giving yourself flowers when depressed is a small but radical gesture. The poem does not resolve the pain, but it reframes it as something that can coexist with tenderness toward oneself.
Across all three poems, repetition, surreal transformation, and domestic imagery work together to blur the boundary between the psychological and the political. Kitchens, gardens, bread, bottles, and feathers become carriers of memory and identity. The strongest moments occur when the imagery is allowed to speak without explanation—the geranium, the feather, the green bottle, the blue cat. These images feel original and unforgettable.
Taken together, the poems create an atmosphere of survival within inheritance—inheritance of race, family, mental struggle, love, and departure. They do not seek neat closure. Instead, they leave the reader inside a living, breathing interior world where pain, history, and tenderness coexist.
Thank you for your response. Please see below.
Dear Kabedoopong,
Thank you for your comments on my poems. I feel visible. I feel seen.
Pain of the mind is more terrible, more terrifying than pain of the body. It is in my poetry, more than anywhere else, that I find a release from the mental torment and personal anguish that I experience on a daily basis. The structure of pain is where my head rests, its foundation. It is where my poetry can be found, in the cement garden. Wild flowers bloom there, of words, phrases, terminology, usage, language. And, yes, there is also tenderness. There must be, I think. Once cannot always have the history of pain, of turmoil, of trial, of tribulation without there also being a sense of equality, a sensibility of tenderness.
Every poet dreams of an acknowledgement like this. How beautiful and complex is your language usage. It is an inheritance. It is my inheritance that has unmasked my purpose, that has offered itself up to me on countless occasions, sparking tension and debate, dialogue and subterfuge. What is always important for the poet to remember is that we don’t just write for ourselves, to give ourselves peace of mind, we don’t just write for happiness or the reward or intention of joy, we have an audience in mind for whom we write, an audience that is always there next to the pen, watching us. Perhaps it is our own soul in the beginning who is witness before the poem comes to the attention of other people.
There are bones in poetry and there is also love. The love of self, at times even the love of ego must exist even if there is no self-love. First do no harm. The poems are in essence psychological in nature. I believe that poems go on with a life force of their own once they enter the natural world. All poems are works of art, works in preparation of something that is greater than the individual. All poems are works in progress. Coming back to the bones of what poetry is, what does this artistry represent, what does it illustrate? I think it illustrates what is at the core of the personality of humanity and not just the individual.
Thank you for taking the time to read these poems and to write so eloquently about your thoughts with so much thoughtfulness and sensitivity Kabedoopong. Please, please, please know that it is appreciated by this humble poet. How you have expressed here yourself has soothed somewhat the painful memories I have of my own despair and mental struggles. It is only a season, is it not?