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ARTS AND CULTURE

In praise of the rituals of others

  • 04 November 2019

 

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