Rosaline/a prose poem for my niece

Today I thought I would live forever. The man I thought I would marry lives in Cambodia now. His mother wrote to me this morning.

She texted me a prayer. She is eighty years old. There are millions of refugees in Sudan. That won’t change overnight. My mother made a birthday cake for a vagrant. My father is eighty. Trump is president of America. My sister is Europe. All my letters, she never reads them. All my love for her is returned to me. This broken clock and silence is all that I have. The hours that stretch before me and behind me is all that I have. My parents love. A niece and nephew. Other mother’s children is all that I have. The memory of wildflowers in your eyes is all I have. You are the sun. You have replaced the energies of the man who was going to play “Husband” in my life. You and your brother.

I have never felt more alone. I spent the morning with my father and the child. She is a bundle of tireless energy and novel words. One day I will not be enough for her and she will seek out the world. Perhaps men, older men in the same way that I did when I was in my twenties in Johannesburg. I think of my mental illness. My dream of becoming a poet that came true.

You are exceptional. You are extraordinary except you are not my daughter, you are not my son. You, C., are a teenager now. It’s been a year since I’ve seen you. We spoke once on the phone. You sounded happy. I miss you. Our long talks and our conversations. You making spag bol in the kitchen the way your mother taught you or making grilled cheese sandwiches when there’s nothing in the house to eat. You grew up in this house but those days are over. Long gone.

I don’t think of V. as intensely as I once did. How fleeting and temporary grown-up happiness is. Daddy is eighty. Mummy is slowly catching up to him.

I am the woman who was married to a soldier for an eternity, and didn’t even know it.

I have forgiven you already. Do you, can you understand that at your tender age? And now I am waiting for the return of that. That you forgive me. When the man of your dreams meets someone else you begin to wonder and try to justify what you saw in him in the first place. You begin to think to yourself how quickly perfection was ruined, summer afternoons talking, sharing, listening to each other but that of course it is going to be alright. You tell yourself that you will meet someone else. It becomes non-negotiable but it is not as easy as it looks. You think you have a connection with every person on this planet but that is not true.

It is important for you to meditate. Apostle Paul says, “Pray without ceasing”. Your loneliness appears on the surface to be the same as mine. I remember your breath inside my body. It was a declaration. It commanded the day, the light shining through the glass of the window. Things were not as they seemed. I called it love in my spirit, then falling in love, then it was done. Finished. The divine power that began the journey of us ended and then the prosperity removal of struggle and despair from my life began.

I often wonder if you are lonely. Are you as miserable as I am? Do you suffer from clinical depression? Do you seek help from a therapist? When I am dead no one will remember me. Not my smile. Not my soul. Not my laughter. Not my spirit in this room or the heart that I carry in daylight. I write a poem and turn it into a personal essay, much later, I turn it into a prose poem, even later, I take it apart, deconstruct it.

We ate lamb shanks for lunch with white rice that honoured my worth and mashed potato that overflowed with abundance. My brother ate his with an open bottle of beer near his plate. I watched the details of him eating, taking it all in. My brother complained that the rice was soggy. It was not to his liking. I looked at his tired, sad and handsome face as he lit up a cigarette standing at the kitchen door.

I eat cheese curls with my mother as she sits across from me. How can I still be in love with someone who ignores me, I say? Well, that’s your fault, she says. Everything is my fault.

In the evening I pray for my family, purging the shroud, the children that are the light of my life, the supernatural instinct and as my body changes shape with time I move forward into an unknown future, flowing streams of enlightenment in the natural, in the flow and ebb of the tunnel of my consciousness. I rotate these living tools for growth and energy with ease.

I will always carry you like I carry the clouds in the sky that day that you left me. I remember that night. I know it like I know the subtleties, nature and the backs of my hands. I can still taste the moonlight at the curve of the back of my throat. The pink light of its cave that develops each time I open my mouth. Yes, I know you and will carry your secrets with me for a lifetime in every fold of my clothing tenderly just because I feel that is what you deserve.

Deconstructing Elmo

I am on the path to enlightenment. The path of inner knowing. Truth leads to inner power, teaches us about knowledge, the preparation and discernment of goals, a declaration of hope and spiritual reality and awareness. Trust in God. He is the absolute deliverer. The spirit is one of the resources of the universe that leads us to our values. Mother Mary is a poignant image, as is the angel Gabriel. I look at the woman, at her slender body, her slender fingers, her open mouth, a gaping hole, a leaf, a wound, her legs and thighs as sturdy as branches, yes, I look at the woman, my sister, my mother, M.’s mother, all three of them beautiful, stared at by men with adoration, and I wonder to myself have they ever felt pain like I have felt pain. You see, I don’t think they have felt pain. I have never been desired like they have been desired. I have never felt the desire, carried a child in my womb for nine months. I think that it’s going to be ok not being in this cold, cruel world amongst people who do not love me or who show any love, care or concern for me. The child who is not my own sleeps next to me. Elmo is on the screen but I have no appetite for Elmo, Cookie Monster and Big Bird. I am determined that I would have moved with grace in the world if I had been loved.