The Blessing

Rustum Kozain

for everywhere that earth shows its rib cage
and the moon goggles with the eyes of children,
we turn away to read
              - Derek Walcott, “The Fortunate Traveller”

In your house
somewhere along the slopes of the mountain,
over the bay in its deep ache of blue,
and the day slowed by the sun,

rooms dark with curtains drawn against February
but stalling, blood-warm in late-summer;
and an army of caffeine like ants
scurrying through you,

the valleys or hills, a pass, inside you
where streams through a thin, frantic black river.
Somewhere along the mountain
in your house, you wake to a city

quiet with another power-cut;
quiet except for the blare of traffic
drifting from the main road.
And somewhere also the children

who laugh and play as if untouched by history
or by the heavy hands of their parents’ gods.
You sit bent over keyboard or notepad,
head in your palm,

in your mouth
a whole night’s talk
like cool, euphoric stone
and your tongue its reticent home.

And soon through the door, elation:
you, mother greeting your young daughter
and love flows following
its easiest, most uncomplicated course

like the fall of her hair
dark and full as her mother’s.
Or the soft, ancient gutturals
by which you bless her

themselves like water murmuring,
declaring again and again its love of stones.
And her eyes dark as yours
by which you also bless her.

Bless her and keep from her
the dark and darkening times
the armies of race
the past and future sorrows

brought by parents of ancient, vengeful gods.
Bless her with your hand on her head.
Bless her and enumerate here for her
the city, its democracy of long division:

here is the mountain, here the sea,
here the rich untroubled by the human
and there the poor,
their lives a bare, biological minimum

colonies for development
their agents in their industry

and affirmative injustice
empowerment by Mammon
or Education Incorporated
archaeology by the rich for the rich.

Bless her. Bless her and may she also know
the ache in the dead-still, ache-blue bay,
the sting in the eyes
when their object is too beautiful;

the in-drawn breath as a mountain at dusk
can soften into innocence,
a gentian cut-out that can yet ache.
Tell her that the good and the true can also ache.

Now the tugs and freighters unmoving,
their crews drink away Saturday afternoon.
Cranes frozen. And beyond,
Matshoba’s ever deferred Makana,

to be always reached always never reached.

Bless her and tell her the apocrypha:
an unfinished flyover
the undiscovered bones
the cost of this painting

at the cost of the poor
who somewhere beyond this canvas
shield their eyes against the flash of zinc
their colonies of shacks

the blinding coinage that buys them nothing.

LitNet: 04 May 2006

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