In a lonely city searching for Walt Whitman and Chris Abani

(for Virgil)

There are things

I don’t tell anyone. I blamed the sunlight

Secrets I keep to myself

I was young once

Ezra Pound’s Alba tell the truth. I go down to the sea

There are things to forget

I found a kind, my kind

A temple that I could worship, destination paradise

We’re somewhere on a beach

Under sunlight I am my true self

I am an African rising in the winter light

Musing

Please don’t forget me

My eyes, the hot potato with butter on the plate with flowers

My lips, the lull, my hands, these warriors

While you love another, the other woman

I am recovering, hungry for you

My sobriety gives me a warm comfort

It is cold

The clouds are made of plasma television

Don’t let me drink a sip of alcohol

Dear God,

The man with the knife in his beak

is gone.

Striving into soft and gentle

waiting hand. The man is given a script

I videotape the dendrite

It storms the experience

My father sits in the physicist’s chair

The tree manages the peach

My rival, my guru

I seek help from the church. This poem’s

matters have a deadline

I go swimming

My limbs have a life of their own

These branches

I have flowers for Sindiwe Magona

I read the poems of Kobus Moolman during this autumn

I sit at the seat of their feet

These fine intellectual eagles

Their country made of meat, honey and milk

My prayers are compulsory

I am guided to the philosophy of

the straight path. No utopian illusion is this.

I am becoming mentally strong

Look at this blueprint

This blank page. The journey within to my mind

I find order in solitude.

In Cambodia the anchor falls

off the shore, to the handsome wind that blows

through every creek, nook and cranny at the docks

I have reached my goal. The destination

that beckoned.

The world is a lonely place

filled with Van Gogh’s sunflowers.

I think of the man’s dirty underwear that his wife washes.

Oh how his mother loves him and his children.

My love has gone to war.

He enjoys his work.

Killing men. Killing the cannibals. The humanities motivate me

to embrace this planet and the rays of the sun.

I stare at his shotgun. I open the book of poems by

Dennis Brutus and read.

I find myself

on the page. Between the blue lines I find lies there

frozen to the touch. I keep finding glaciers and

equality. The personal freedom of Milan Kundera

there in the narrative’s river

All I have in front of me is this.

Is this diary of an insomniac. When their daughter

came into this world  I immediately became her  teacher.

To the man,

(I want back in my life)

It is never going to happen

He will not return to me

Years will pass and I will grow old

He will still not return

So I think that he is dead to me

But not to another woman

He buys flowers for another, he kisses another, has children with another,

makes love with another

She has a spacious house to raise their children in, their cherubs

She drives a very smart car

She does not care for feminism or equality of the sexes, only birthday cakes

She enjoys his hand in the small of her back

This ex-soldier who was stationed in the Congo, my voice studies him

This ex-military man

He was in the air force

One day I won’t want him back in my life

One day I will say, ”I forget you,” and starve my body of him,

of his memory, the memory of his touch

I want my life back

But a woman who loses in love has painful thoughts

Tonight I am inside this poem and this poem

gives me life.

In a lonely city was the winner of the 2023 Sol Plaatje European Union Poetry Award Winning Poem.

Dear Starry Night, The Ukraine-Russia War Is The Interview Of The Week

Am writing

Green Jalapeños In War during an invasion

Am reading

Emily Dickinson in war

Charles Bukowski in war

This war life has broken me

Challenged me in war

Purple beetroot in war

Green spinach in war

Orange carrot juice in war

Bittersweet naartjie on my tongue in war

The divine matters in war

secrets of poetry matter in war

We don’t have forever in war

And that’s the truth

Blood turns into pomegranate seed

Truth finds exits out

We pour the salt into the wound

Bullets are like razors

Driven into the ground like a fever

The clock works like magic in war

The lonely dragon

and the dogs have skinny legs

I turn books during this war

into old friends

I call it “natural progression”

I sustain these books

as night turns into war

and day turns into hell

like relationships in my inner circle

Inside the mind of this poet

is a classical mind

a third World War

Tendai Mwanaka and Montgomery Clift

are men on a mission

taking the practical approach during war

They embrace art

during combat maneuvers

If the paradigm remains in control

and does not shift

In this blue reality

all the chairs are empty

Everyone is gone

Only I’m a captive locked

in this lonely place

I pray for serendipity, a son

I long for a song

Happiness and its pursuit

I meditate. I give. I hope

It will always be this way

because of the choices I made

That does not escape me

Now after all this time

Hours and and the silence

Maybe it’s supposed to be guiding me

I keep busy and distract myself in war

Practice good. Do good. I tell myself

Read

Navigate

Soon this war will be over

Or the illusion of it

Soon

We’ll still have the knowledge

of the wildflowers

Hunger mirrors sky

lonely in a minor key

War has a thin laugh

The woman in that mirror

her head is filled with starlight

Refraction takes place

Light bends

The Ukrainian woman

ties her hair back

with a black ribbon

The trees are unhappy

They have lost all their joy

The sea is green

The sun is lonely

An echo falls to the ground

A child is crying

An old woman left behind in war

is strong

Like magic she comes to life

in front of the journalist’s camera

Win or quit river phoenix

War is a novella

Suffering is a galaxy

Everyone has a fractured identity

We’re living inside the suicide

of a glacier

ascendance

mysticism

young constellations

We’re in interplanetary alignment

The paper is brittle

The sun is brittle

Cold and lifeless is the night

Inert is a better word

I blame the sunlight

The wasp found sadness there

This second poem was shortlisted for the Writing Ukraine Prize in early 2023.

Thirst

Yehuda Amichai

Marina Tsvetaeva

Nadine Gordimer

Han Kang

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Remember these names

Nadia Davids

Mongane Serote

Khaled Juma

Refaat Alareer

Although there are too many to mention

please, please I beg you

to remember them

If you have the time

Write these names down

Study what they have to say

They are writing for the future

Thirst appeared in a Canadian anthology, Unsilenced Poems for Palestine, and in the poetry collection Songs For Palestine: Struggle Poems).