Selected poems
In praise of the rituals of others
Today I frosted the kitchen window because
before it finds the mountain through the glass
door of the balcony it must pass through
our shared hallway and the new neighbors
are moving in just as we'd started to befriend
the old ones. There is nothing to hide but the usual
human foibles and vanities but we have learned
privacy by rote all our westernised lives
and can be driven to distraction by our own
self-view. So thank God for the rituals of others —
the unofficial town criers and underseers
of business as usual. Disrupters of complacency
and conviction. Thank God for the shift worker
laundering at 3am, the self-talker shooing
imaginary unwanted guests with nothing
more than the thinning straw of a broom.
Thank God for Bollywood and daytime TV.
For the all night partyers and marathon
love makers. For the hash brownie bakers,
the nut crackers and pot-stirrers.
And yes even the drum-beating banjo-twanging
wannabe musicians. But special thanks God
for the incense wafting up from the first floor
through our bathroom vent — frankincense
I'm tempted to think on this particular day
discovering the tonal shifts and rapid firing
of water through old pipes is in glorious fact
the ululation of women at the door of number 1
where a daughter is newly born and Lipton tea
is spiced with cardamom and cinnamon
and the curtains are never drawn.
(I) Confirm humanity (by not clicking the check box)
But by way of being this breath
elemental conceivable
spore-like.
By way of rare and habitual song.
By way of moving my body
in tune seasonally in love.
By way of speaking by design
light-filled words without end.
By way of this hand in that.
By way of scars whose origins
I own and admonish and pardon.
By way of depth of sorrow breadth of joy.
By way of honoring rainmakers stargazers
keepers of story and promise and faith.
By way of the heart's defiant trajectory
looping back on itself across the fissures.
By way of my nature both real and imagined
both creaturely and eternally seraphic ...
The world gifted back to itself
A tractor is levelling the beach
erasing yesterday's tourist tracks
and because its driver in his wisdom
finds no sense or joy in separating
the hum of the engine from the hum
of the sea caressing the edge of the world
he is also able to divine in the tyre prints
such marvels as the migration of birds
flying backward through time.
Further along a runner stops and drops
to a squat just long enough to mark out
a small grid above the tideline and
a near-perfect circle in its centre square.
A father plays chasings with his small children
zigzagging in and