Poem in the original English, followed by translations to Xhosa and Afrikaans and back.
Blue light chases me.
My soul is cold,
spirit still dreaming.
In a meadow I roll down the hillocks
over and over,
my little sear suckered skirt frilly
over my still narrow hips.
A movie an angel might wish to watch
or a pederast.
Translation and edit:
In the meadow I roll down the hillock
my short skirt ruffled.
On my stretching back now,
a starlet with one hell of a fan.
The sun salivates.
What I know about the submission?
I’m all hardware and no market.
Art to me:
My rib, you know the war.
What nation can be fed by my fall?
A salivating sun
licks a sailboat lost from harbor.
What do I know about submission?
All steel and no magnolia.
Eloquence runs from me.
From my rib you can take a war.
What nation can be fed by my falling eyelashes
that this fluid angel warps around my form?
Your neighbors know you better than you do.
My hat is me-
black and white and full of
Hamptons zeitgeist.
On an irritable coastal crag a gaggle of
children considers drowning while their mothers read an Amish romance,
while their fathers surf with mirrors.
Wrens build subdivisions in the sky blue earth lid
A mirror to my own gridlock of houses,
land with sharp corners.
To be free to be freewheeling,
with nothing to fear but sharper teeth and
gravity
is a life I do not wish for.
Lights are scarlet away and foamy.
We have a vast space in the night.
Do you remember how my feet
burned with happiness,
my bones black with jealousy?
I was a rock star on the asphalt.
Scarlet lights chase away the foamy,
ebony space of night.
Does the road remember my feet,
their burning wide imprints hunting for homeopathic
happiness?
There was such a searing black pain in my bones,
glittering and sharp like the starry rocks in asphalt.
I hauled pain with me like water in those
uncivil days.
You always box
Always time.
He is a jazz concert
Do bunny slippers.
Together you the river
The dam was still missing
The flowmeter memory
And jargon like foam.
Open your mouth
And as a family to come
God weaves seasons in rotation.
In soft, silky, silver skeins.
Prosperity is a blanket of grass.
The verdant scenes of fear.
He longs for us,
Price my sorrow and enter me bleeding.
The devil is in the trees feeding off
birds and butterflies,
his grim business shattering in silver teeth.
God is in the trees spinning webs
Soft, silky, and verdant like a blanket of grass.
Spiders fear him.
He longs to draw me to Him,
to slip his gentle fangs in my hurt and anesthetize me,
suck out my misery and take it into Him
bleeding for me.
Miniature Moon 