Five Poems by Abigail George

 

The white gaze

“To create is to live twice.”

Albert Camus

“I used to think the goal was to be loved. Now I know it’s to be understood.”

Emma Thompson

We are kind to each other

The cooking utensil to the other 

cooking utensils in the drawer

The spoon to the other spoons, yes, everything 

must have its place, every trace 

of prey, each invisible doorway  

into the kitchen

What is courage, 

what is increase? It is only a

place to start

The garden is cool, 

the tree’s shade

My father’s voice

I murmur a response

The washing hangs on the line

My brother’s daughter strums 

a toy guitar, we have a 

butternut pizza for supper

We can’t get the boys out of the angry green sea,

nor can we get them out of the jacuzzi

The white gaze lies dormant

in the shade like our brown bodies

We put a plaster on her finger

the wound is bloodless now

I make iced matcha lattes for myself and my dad

I lick the white moustache off my upper lip

Overnight I have turned into a capitalist

My fingers into stars, my legs 

into a wave, the bead of the presenter’s 

tongue on the television into a fig

The current moves through me

This time it’s personal

It catches the light of the fire

inside my father, inside all of us

The smell of burning meat, drumsticks

The kitchen is time and memory

Legs are tanned, burned by the sun’s time and memory

The boys and my sister play a board game

My mother screams and screams at me

The room grows quiet

A pink geranium grows out of my mother’s throat

Something within me is crushed like a pill

Slowly the sun in my mother’s eyes

turns into a mocking face, a laugh

Its poison is killing me slowly. She is just a woman

and I am just a woman

The moment passes

The child starts to laugh too because my mother is laughing

I break, I break

A wave flows into me and I lose consciousness

It’s evening

The game continues

A woman walks by the house with her dog

The dog barks

There’s a white feather in my mouth

It tastes like snow

 

 

Going

“When we can’t think for ourselves, we can always quote.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein

 

I offer you cranberry bread.

I offer you this knife for the hard cheese.

I offer you this clock.

I offer you the dark.

I offer you this fruit.

I offer you this orange.

I offer you this as a blessing.

I offer you this sweetness.

I offer you this shroud.

I offer you this veil.

I offer you this truth.

I offer you this memory.

I offer you, Africa.

I offer you these gifts.

I offer you equality.

I offer you this ancient sea.

I offer you music.

I offer you this river.

I offer you this garden as meditation.

I offer you the history of this continent.

I offer you this as an alternative.

I offer this to you for our salvation.

I offer this to you because I love you.

I offer you this because today you are getting on a ship,

and sailing far away from me.

I offer you sleep, captor.

I offer you this forest that I dragged behind me

because you have the personality

of foolish paper and the medicine of the wildflower.

I offer you this frozen mist.

I am offering you this blue cat. Take it.

Please accept it gracefully.

Let it be your companion.

I offer the dissolution of the sun.

And now, now I come to peace.

Now I come to minister to you.

I bring you coffee and poetry books.

I will bring you a pen and an empty journal for your thoughts.

It was Christ who brought us this morning.

It is time. It is the hour of your departure.

I turn to embrace you, to say goodbye.

Waiting/Relapse

“Put down the pen someone else gave you.  No one drafted a life worth living on borrowed ink.”

Jack Kerouac

 

“Today I can’t stand myself, and I will force myself to write because you’re unhappy. So, I must mask the monster within and find the landing place. I must smile because I want to see you smile. I must count the days and remain quiet in your presence, because you are not at peace. This is what I tell my mind on bad days.”

Abigail George

 

I took a walk and found a poem.

It gave me good advice.

It told me to be kind to myself.

It told me to do the dishes,

to go for long walks.

That fresh air is good for me.

It told me to listen to my mother.

It told me to forgive my father.

That to fix my broken brain,

I had to love myself.

 

I live in the past.

I live inside this year of sadness.

You, the man, are no longer here.

I tell myself that I’m free.

I have no mother.

I have no father.

I am not a daughter anymore.

I have no sister.

I have no brother.

These days I keep to myself.

Birds inside my head.

 

Birds kept inside mental cages.

The cold sea is a great comfort.

Some nights this pain is endless.

Tonight, the garden is psychotic.

I have been put in isolation.

The door is locked from the outside.

I receive no visitors.

There are bars at the window.

Charles Bukowski’s ghost sits beside me.

He strokes my hair.

 

He makes me feel beautiful.

I took a sip of his beer.

It makes me feel warm inside, good.

I hear the women’s laughter.

They start throwing stones at me.

Even this pain is medicine.

Although it makes me feel mediocre.

Strong medicine like Chopin.

I finished the bottle.

I hid the green bottle away

under the sheets that felt like winter

I jumped out of the window.

 

The slow torture of night catches me.

Mrs Williams, the dead pastor’s wife,

told me to stop complaining. You’re alive

for a purpose: to dream, to have a child.

Live, she said. Find reasons to live.

I read a poem by Kobus Moolman.

I write to the Dutch English poet

Joop Bersee. Nothing makes the

darkness go away. My brother

locks me out of the house.

But first, his fist rains down on me.

I disappeared somewhere.

 

Once Rilke’s wife, always Rilke’s wife.

The cloud hurts.

The sun hurts.

The snail laughs at me.

You couldn’t even land a man, it says.

How to be great, I ask?

Be kind, Oprah says.

So, I am kind.

The world forgets all about me.

Just like my mother did.

 

On my birthday there was no cake

or presents. There were no red balloons.

I ate beans and rice in the kitchen

with my father. The stigma is refreshing.

The bones of madness is a gem, trivia.

I went on holiday to Provincial Hospital.

This trip taught me to understand others.

It taught me to understand myself more.

Nowadays when depressed I give myself flowers.

I keep my pain to myself.

The good husband

 

The good husband

stands vertically in the

kitchen, flat on his back

He washes the dishes

even when he is tired

The good husband

is my sweet father

He sweeps the floor

He listens to me

He is the only one who does

He babysits his granddaughter

He sits in the hot garden

next to his gambling son

who smokes a joint

and drinks whiskey alone

in the study. My father,

he doesn’t know what to do

about his depression,

about his cancer,

about his wife who doesn’t

love him, and he wishes to

marry another, he wishes

to change his religion

He eats my food, my rice,

my fish and cold potatoes

and says it tastes good

Dad’s lips are pink, he sips water

He is a good man, a beautiful tree

I rest under the pale shade of that tree

I am one of his branches

He is a wounded man, his mood is a particle,

a vein, some fruit

He has been a good husband

We are Kafka, dad and me

We are gazelle, light-footed

dad and me, it has always been dad and me

I don’t dedicate poems anymore to people

I’m through with love

He says that I’m a good woman

I’ll find someone one day

I tell him he doesn’t have to say that

I open the curtains

The sun falls into my lap

My mother locks me

back in the attic

They put my father

in the sitting room

He writes on paper in pencil

saying he has found a cure

for all social ills

Saying he has found a cure

for bladder cancer

Saying he has found a cure

for me too

They let me out

when I’m good

Only when I’m good

 

 

No more fruit on the trees

 

A man steps out of his shower

and a bomb falls out of the sky

On the other side of the world

a woman walks into IKEA

as a bomb falls out of the sky

There is nothing left for us to do

but to get out of this hell hole

There is nothing left for us to do

but to get out of this place

There is nothing left for us to do

but to go to paradise 

and live there

 

There are no settlers in paradise

There is, in other words, 

no settler occupation in paradise

When we die, we must go to paradise

Does this make sense to you?

This bomb

This invasion

This war

This genocide

This total annihilation

It is not making sense to me 

But I forgive

If I don’t, I’ll go insane

 

Little Flower

The sun fades away 

into a key in the palm of my hand

A significant other 

disappeared into the snow,

into the field

You were the white-hot sand

that I walked upon,

that shouted beneath my feet

Bombs fell into the mountains

Into the all-girls school

Into the hospital

There is rubble that is a day old

There is rubble that is ancient

Ancient and wise

There is no longer 

any fruit on these trees

The ancient and wise 

fruit are long gone

By Abigail George