TO HUG A MAPLE TREE
Once a man caught between my legs -
soft, the weight of my covers over us
confessed to the rape of his mother
and to his work on a white man’s farm
And he became to me no different
From the man in blue overalls
In the back yard of my family home
Rolling the hosepipe round his arm
His eyes unable to meet mine
I imagined that I’d let him in
Through the kitchen and into my room
And the more he spoke the more inseparable
we became…
From the men seated at the back of a contractor’s bakkie
From the nondescript figures at the taxi rank
How easily we fall…
Into the black mass
The dirt roads
The Other
When I told you how they broke into my home
And tied my mother up and lay her on the floor
What did I become to you?
a weight?
a black whole?
I am distrusting of how easily you can go
from one end of the world to another
Half of my kind…half another
They have a place for your hybridity where I am from
They have positioned you in proximity to,
but above us
And yes, I want more
But I am heavy, and I hurt to hold
In my dreams I have my arms
wrapped around a maple tree
And the dry earth has fingers
Corse around my ankles
And the sky does not shelter
And the sun…the unrelenting sun.
In my dreams there are gale force winds
But my grip is fastened
My arms around the maple
It is autumn now
We are seated across from each other
In a bar in New England
We have escaped the suffering of our kind
We have discussed some of the ways that we can remain here
You have a plan more considerable than mine
And I have a dream that suffocates
I have arms that cling