the picture
Where my mother sat was a tabernacle,
straw coloured light on wooden walls,
blinds flapping in the afternoon wind,
a boom of canvas hitting at ennui -
sugar-coated with death
and quite a stout woman -
above her and her bone china,
that picture, the silverfish aquatint,
my first view of great prose,
Ruth and Naomi -
I stared at the caption while death got closer,
I could see
through verandah railings the red and green
of the milky poinsettia,
I listened
to the precise vernacular of late afternoon
and sponge fingers. Whither
thou goest, I shall go; thy people shall be
my people and thy God, my God.
Of all green things
my life was the most hostile, my very flesh,
as it grew, an alien corn,
and she smiled
knowing it a gift of hers, browning in the sun,
despairing at
the charm it carried, a crying future, epistemology
of dying.
And the mother-in-law turning to the Moabitess
was like a fire-proof door opening
on hell, and hell flickered in the garden.
The picture brought death into the house, a guest
we got used to -
I turned from her last fidelity and wouldn't
cry at her end, and now I wait
the call to follow the proud woman to a homeland
not like home
where the violent rain beats on
an unlined roof of galvanized iron, and the sullen boy
kept like bees in the dark
swears love to the howling flesh finally and for ever.
Page(s) 118
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