A Nowhere Place
It's beautiful, this heaven.
God's grace, this island.
No superpowers, almost.
Rainforest,
landscape.
I have my faith
satisfaction for the senses.
I'm here,
this artists' enclave, paradise for painters.
God's provided everything for this self-exiling.
Yet my thoughts, dreams
are immobilised by a livid fear
that I'll forget my past
so I dreamtime, dreamtime, dream.
And so spiders spin webs all over the weatherboards
and factories of ants, earwigs, snails
busily go about making this
home.
This one, here,
at the neon light
in the kitchen,
funnel-webbed.
My ears glean Australian from magazines
literary this and that.
Our children say oi for an eye.
The only time I'm real is when I dream I'm dying
the only urgency, one I self-create.
Other passengers
or images
flash by.
I am alive only to the rhythm
of this uncaught, untaught line
that dictates
its life to me:
We alone
are frost to silence in ourselves
alone, we are
that call
to harbour,
set afloat
balloons of images,
buoyant, hopeful
with messages on them …
(In collection,: Poems from Mt Moono, Johannesburg, 1989.)
© Anne Kellas |
