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Love in the time of Corona – picture us
Unframed Picture us Unframed, reframed See us in all the places that we could not be Prohibited, inhibited Shapes connecting dying breath to life through plastic, steel, sweat, despair Hearts and faces with hidden bruises Shadows around a grave. Remember us In queues, on lines Recall us in all the ways we could not be Separated. Resegregated. Dimly distant in each other’s eyes and our own minds Footprints washed away before they could be followed. Trust and truth erased. Watch us Sinking. Rising Deeply hungering to hold and heal Hunkering with blame and rage Drunk on defiance and compliance Passing bucks. Creating decoys. Excuses to deploy. Imagine us Unmasked.…
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Love in the time of Corona – looking out
Between When I look up, I see infinite iterations. And then my heart is free to fill the sky. When I look down, I see a world made small and mean by hate and fear, where I cannot move or touch. I will not share a photo of down. Down is your windowless bedroom and bathroom, beside the railway and the endless earthquake of trucks. There is a world between us but we both may hear the birds. Song of the Birds What a paradox, to feel connected and belonging to the sky and cut off so completely from the earth. I have a home and must cover my face…
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Love in the time of Corona – locked down
Love in the time of Corona – locked down It is a time of suffocation. Under boots and knees In blood and water Behind masks and machines By speaking and silencing Deaths through which we cannot accompany each other Beyond virtual spaces, bought from billionaires Who rent us the freedom to be sold. Suffocation of the spirit Where we teach our children How not to die by touching My children might learn more from me By the embracing and letting go of love Than by this clinging to a singular fear And the flinging away of imagination. The world on my phone and out of my window imagines ways to…
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Love – and death – in the time of Corona
The process to establish the protocol for allowing a packet to leave the building involved six people. They sprayed me, the packet, and each other, passing the item through three doors, standing it on a table, then on a shelf and taking it outside. I appreciated the precautions but I think someone slipped into the building unsprayed while we were dancing.
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Love in the time of Corona – early days
The weekend after the first case of Coronavirus was confirmed in KwaZulu-Natal, I travelled to Zimbabwe, not knowing it would be the last time we were allowed to leave the country for nearly two years. Harare was ahead of Durban with news and sanitiser. 'Where are you from?' they asked at the airport. Durban. 'Spray her again' yelled a fellow passenger...
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Seeking spiders
Arachnophilia – finally. When fear of isolation overcomes fear of spiders. You can view the video version on the Shorelines Poetry channel.
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Tell Him
I do not want to hear any more about why. I want to know why not. I can write you the story of why, the story of colonisation and socialisation, of depredation and emasculation. I can write you the story of why, of emotional muteness, of physical bruteness. Of manhood negated, frustrated, contested, neglected. Of lack, of loss, of bottles, buttons and needles. Of guns and gangs, of lawlessness and lovelessness. Of roles reversed, of boundaries burst. I do not want one more story of why. Tell me why not. Tell me why he didn’t. Tell me why he won’t. Tell me why he does not seek his manhood in…
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At War With Ourselves
South Africa appears to be at war with itself. To rape and murder a woman or a child, to attack, rob and chase away one’s neighbour is to kill something in ourselves. We talk of ‘Toxic masculinity’ – of a way of being a man that is poisonous, corrosive and fatal to anyone who threatens a perverse notion of ‘manhood’. This toxic masculinity is not only personal. It is global. We see individual men rape, impregnate, infect, terrorise and kill babies, children and women – and men who do not conform. We see governments enact legislation and policy to control the bodies of girls and women – including forcing children…
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Strangers in a faraway land
‘Once upon a time of fear and sorrow, the children of my village were woken suddenly in the night. We heard screaming and shouting. Our world turned upside down. Lightning and thunder came from the ground and fire came from the sky… We crossed a river to a faraway land. The grass was green and the leaves of the maize whispered our arrival…’ Deborah’s short story Strangers in a Faraway Land was selected for inclusion in the Heartlines Stories that Talk 2 collection for children aged 8-13 years in 2010. It is a fable about seeking refuge and about the experience of empathy and othering in exile. This story, like…
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Seeds of the Heart
You were born quietly, from water into water. Your mother moaned and breathed out. You breathed in as we rose together into candlelight. The cord that connected us gave up its pulse. Your life filled my heart. Your father’s laughter filled the room. The cord filled a small space between dark soil and the fragile roots of a coral tree. The tree grew silently, slowly, slenderly, out of your thought and sight. You came to know it was your tree but it was too small to climb, too sparse for birds to nest, too young to dazzle with the fiery-fingered flowers from which it took its name. As you…
