At Gillooly’s

Jayne Bauling

You with your Five Roses tea
and me with my g-and-t
from Mrs Sippi Blue,
we sit at the table
too late – as usual – for sunset
while Abdul does the daddy-bit
faithfully following the two-year-old,
ready to rescue.
The April day’s cool decline
is coloured pewter,
slate and charcoal,
gathering darkness a gauzy veil
through which we view
this Jozi full of Africa.
There is the solid mass of the ridge
and the gleam of the water, breeze-ruffled,
and beyond water the long vista
to The Ponte –
whose bizarre brainchild? I forget –
and here my eyes are drawn
not by the lightshow
of capitalist commerce
playing over its exterior
like a movie on a distant drive-in screen,
but by what I cannot see:
lives lived and lost within,
interacting or in isolation
in a folly full of Africa,
edifice made of a Continent,
round tower built of people
come hoping or despairing
from how many other cities, towns and villages
to find or lose how many parts of themselves?

LitNet: 12 July 2006

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