Fire Word Friday - 2 July 18h00 to 19h30, 37 Main Road, Greenpoint. R30 gets you in.

Launch of Poetry Anthology by Lucille Greeff

Performance poet and Simon’s Town resident, Lucille Greeff, launches her debut poetry anthology on 5 February 2010. The launch will be hosted at The Novalis Ubuntu Institute, 39 Rosmead Avenue, Wynberg from 18h30 for 19h00 to 20h30.

This unique anthology, entitled Glaskastele / Skylight of the Heart is a collection of Afrikaans and English poems published by Lotsha Publications.

Also performing on the night will be poets Tania van Schalkwyk, Khadija Heeger and Winslow Schalkwyk. Live music by Maxim Starcke, live art by Elaine Millin. For more information please contact Lucille on 021 786 2627 or 083 377 5027.

The evening aims to raise money for Symphonia for South Africa, a not-for profit that aims to strengthen the fabric of South African society.

Entrance R30 / T30 (CES) at the door. Kids u/12 and pensioners free of charge. Books for sale on the evening. Drinks and snacks will be served.

Praise for Glaskastele / Skylight of the Heart:

At the root of Lucille Greeff's best offerings lies an otherness of perception, an enchanting, quirky linguistic and imaginative bent, which vindicates the search by our publishers to develop new talent, and which is a delight to encounter. It is a search that does not shy away from what is endemic to the South African experience but rather tries to retrieve it with love and care. Lucille skryf om die beurt in Engels en in haar harts-Afrikaans. Ek hoop om hierdie grinterige jong vrouestem in die toekoms weer teë te kom.
Charl-Pierre Naude, poet and critic

Lucille Greeff offers a fresh, resounding voice with extraordinary perception and humour. Her poetry is uniquely bilingual; she seems equally and lyrically at ease in Afrikaans and English, making both languages sing.
Deborah Steinmair, journalist and poet

Biography

Lucille Greeff is an Organisation Development Consultant with a Masters degree in Development Studies and an Honours degree in Psychology. She has extensive experience working in leadership development, strategy and culture change within the retail-, manufacturing-, public-, IT-, food services-, resource-, NGO-, health-, education- and mining sectors. She partners individuals, teams and organisations in their journeys toward greater community and the realisation of their dreams. Her facilitation practice draws on her experience and diverse skills, including laughter therapy, wilderness therapy and vision questing, narrative psychology, system dynamics, assessment centres, strategy, culture change and community building. She is equally comfortable working in boardrooms and rural communities. She is a Director of Treetops Consulting (www.treetops.co.za).

Lucille writes because, as with breathing, it’s not much of a choice. She lives in Simon’s Town with her best friend and partner James and their sons Tariq Phoenix and Björn. Her long term goal is to be as graceful as a jellyfish.

Glaskastele / Skylight of the Heart is her debut anthology.

Funeral

I stand inside the chapel courtyard as the aunties and uncles spill onto the street. The hearse waits patiently next to the man in coattails. Who decided that undertakers should wear such things, I muse, as loved ones say their final goodbyes.

Earlier, Sarah Doreen Ford, known fondly as Aunt Sarah, lay in her coffin and Sunday best to usher friends and family: Christian, Muslim and even Wimla in her Hindu sari, into her memorial service. Her cheeks had left with her spirit five days before. This early morning of mourning saw her skin tautly drawn over her skull as if to manifest her willingness to leave her physical form behind. But for the moment her body was still there, and Bernard rested his hand absentmindedly on the open casket.

After all the myrrh and blessed art thou’s there was nothing left to say to her, now thankfully closed coffin.

I stand inside the chapel courtyard with my squirming son planted on my hip as they carry her to the car and roll her into its hungry mouth, the one that will carry her to the fire of ‘ashes to ashes’. From the corner of my eye I notice the undertaker who dusts off his coattails. Only moments before the red and white procession left the church he had stomped out his own guilty cigarette and ticket to the afterlife.

He noiselessly claps his hands as if to celebrate a successful performance, closes the trunk and slimes his way into the driver’s seat. The engine starts up smoothly.

There is no coffin left for Bernard’s roaming hand to rest on. His outstretched arm finds the back windscreen, all tinted and dark. His wife hides behind the glass wall. His fingers inch forward with the car as it slowly makes its way through the people.

She is leaving.

Now.

She is gone.

I can hear 45 years of marriage rip itself from his spirit. His rummaging hand can find nothing but his own face, a sudden deluge flooding the street outside the Chapel of St Phillip. Through the clouds in his eyes as he watches the hearse drive off, I see the reflection of a distant memory in my own heart. I remember watching another car, another mother, my own, disappear down a street fifteen years ago. The winter lawn under my young feet then, had been yellow and dead and desperate.

The forced goodbyes of death tear cartilage and veins through the skin, leaving us desecrated. There are some spaces that we carry inside our chests that never fill up again, no matter how much time passes.

The memory flickers on and then off again as I join the procession to the hall down the road. We all try to skip over the dog shit on the pavement on the way there. Some are less successful than others as the steps outside the hall bear the testimony of those who failed to walk with light feet. Inside though, the tables are dripping with muffins and scones and other sugary delights to soothe the sadness of the day away in a frenzied bout of comfort eating.

Bernard moves with us, back in his role as organiser and generally hospitable and together man. His goodbye is safely hidden in the breast pocket of his grey suit. For extra measure he holds on to my boy, his safety blanket, to help him keep the grief at bay. My son promptly blesses him with milk vomit on his left shoulder as if to say that for some present, life was still a very fresh affair.

There is no ‘stop’ button, no pause. In breathing and living we are committed to the flow of time. The heartache cannot will time to stop, for Bernard or for me.

Today’s goodbye was crammed into one moment of fingers torn from a car window. The wheels roll on. Memories desperately try to keep up with us, but the big holes left by the ones we once loved, still love, remain no matter how fast or slow we travel.

© 2006 Lucille Greeff

What I actually wanted to say to Vroue Keur. after a rant about the way fairytales condition girls.

Pluk jou lat meisiemens!

Trourok, doodsrok, glans geleentheidsrok.

Rekening oortrokkerok,

geen verleentheidsrok

soos ons skaamteloos spandabelrig

‘n gatlikke gemeenskappe vier.

Die mans drink bier,

die vrouens kloek

hier en daar om Prinses Grimering.

Die lelike eendjies is uitgevat

om Haar vlerke blinker te laat lyk.

Ons trou! Ons trou!

Ons streef na niks meer as vandag.

Hierna het als wat saakmaak reeds gebeur;

ambisie op die altaar geoffer

in ruil vir ‘n model man sonder waarborg

of diensplan.

© 2006 Lucille Greeff

submission for Vroue Keur... a conservative afr mag doing an article about marriage.

Eregas

Ek staan saam voor die kansel, saam met al die groot idealisme.
Ek is geweef in elke draadjie van haar witwas droomrok
waar sy staan langs haar droomman.
Hier vier ons vandag ‘n droomtoekoms saam:
lang vakanises hand aan hand, romantiese aande voor kaggelvure
en dalk, eendag, as die tyd reg is, ‘n kroos en ‘n familiemotor.

Ek staan voor die kansel saam met vrae en vol van trou beloftes:
sy beloof met hart en siel aan haar man wat vandag
geen voet in haar oë verkeerd kan sit nie.
‘n Traan rol met perfekte tydsberekening uit die hoek van haar oog,
sy glimlag breed vir die fotograaf, deel piksoene uit vir die familie
en staan voor in die ry saam met manlief vir die feesmaal.

Prinses: perfek en pragtig!
Vir ‘n dag glo sy weer soos ‘n dogtertjie in sprokies
en ‘n enkele prins op sy wit perd.

Die wittebrood bak warm tussen hulle,
maar kom louwarm terug huis toe na twee weke.
Voor sy haarself kan kry staan die broodjie yskoud
langs die vuil skottegoed in die kombuis.

Hulle glimlag vasberade as mense vra
hoe dit gaan met die ‘getroude lewe’.
Die foto van die groot dag pryk eers in die middle van die koffietafel,
skuif dan na die boekrak en verdwyn later stil-stil in die laai in
onder rekeninge en realiteit.

Stadig maar seker verander gelukkig en getroud in bitter berou.
Die kiekie maak ‘n laaste verskyning soos dit agterna gegooi word
die dag wat hy sy goed vat en trek, Ferreira se voet,
sy soek haar nooiensvan terug asseblief!

Ek staan saam voor die kansel in die nate van ‘n trourok
en glimlag skeef vir die vriende en nuwe skoonfamilie
vergader om die paartjie.

Soveel drome val dalk plat, soveel verhoudings faal,
soveel keer is ek verkeerd…
Maar ek is elke bruid se beste vriend:
soms wankelrig, soms sterk, soms sand en soms soos steen.
Ek is die een trougas by elke troue op die dorp.
Ek is die Hoop (geloof en liefde) wat sy vandag vertrou,
die Hoop in iets wat saam met haar en ook haar man kan groei.
Vandag alleen, kan ek regeer!

© 2006 Lucille Greeff

My Secret Manuscript

I am shrinking my words,
hiding them on small scraps
in the middle of the night
when our home sails
the territories of sleep.
I hide them in secret drawers
inside my mouth and chest
and whisper them to my son
as he nestles into my breath,
against my breast,
in the hours before dawn.

Ink is hard to come by
in the land of milk and honey,
every line committed to paper
weighs itself down with expectation
and the history of having beaten
all the other words to it..

I am shrinking my words
to meet my son’s mouth
in its infant sounds:
I learn to gurgle and splatter
my spit in a blessing
to another mother,
the one under my feet.

I am writing in the flesh these days,
my footsteps and fingers
weave my words into the fibres
of my living,
my body the manuscript
I’m committing to memory

© 2006 Lucille Greeff

And the Word was Woman
A creation myth

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God,
and the God gave birth to the stars and symbols.
The stars became life and symbols gave meaning.
Life came to earth breathing into all creatures,
allowing meaning to root inside all of sound.

The sounds of language echoed out from the planet
and life in the living was a looking glass landscape,
reflecting the symbols and stars, both sacred and sonic.
God looked into the mirror, seeing self in a single sign:
the word that came first, a word full of wonder.

Through all of time, the Word was with God,
and that Word was Woman.

© 2006 lucille greeff

Prints

I elevate my angle on reality:
the noise of saturday morning lawnmowers
ascends to my ears bluntly,
as I watch the imprint of man on mountain
in my silent ruminations.

I blink
twice to wipe away time:
the houses, streets, cars, gardens,
all the stains of civilisation,
undergo an instant naturalisation.
The alien flora alters itself
into indigenous fynbos…
gone are the port jackson stains
on the koppies that ring my perch!

What bliss!

The faint twitters of a sunbird
crescendo into my conscious world;
instantly the fluttering of its wings,
the rapid advance of a beetle,
become audible.

If only the footprint of our own development,
our steady war on our world,
could be wiped as easily as this:
the dual quivering of eyelids,
to delete ourselves from earth.

As I sit roosting I realise
that such a feat would merely sever
action from accountability:
we are man-, child-, woman-kind, all
responsible for our unearthly creations:
our ivory towers, carbon monoxide freeways,
inbred unnatural spaces, mountains of waste,
our consumer branded lives.

That we are ‘users’ becomes clear
in the contrast of creators.

I blink
again to stretch time forward
and this still semi sane space
jerks itself into a slum,
my mountain lookout now a
littered mound that reeks of rot.
All the land is long used up,
as if our actions sneak up on us
as we play hide and seek with
the cause and effect of our species.
The air is sulphur fumes filled
with the screams of our post-
industrial post-
natural world.

I blink
this barely sacred sphere
is but a heartbeat away
from being a skulking cesspit.

I blink
and breathe, my heart
races ahead in time and back again
as I dress myself in the activism
of loving this planet,
naturally,
not synthetically.

I blink
once more to return to my perch.
I am illuminated in my disgust.
This half mountain, half man place
moves me
beyond time, beyond the revulsion
climbing in my throat.

I blink
a tear, a wry smile
and shrink my own footprint smaller still
as if to twist the arm of all humanity.

© 2006 lucille greeff

“The miracle of sleep is still more important to me than the miracle of life” said a friend earlier today.

I have fond memories of sleep. It’s been a while. Last night the Miracle of Life named Tariq woke up 15 times. Sometimes only 20 minutes apart. The boundaries between dream reality and the reality of a screaming baby in the bedroom become thin at times like these.

I’ve come to realise that guilt is an amazingly huge and silent part of motherhood. I feel guilty all the time. Guilty for wishing for the freedom of pre-miracle days, guilty if I eat onions or chocolates or strawberries (the baby gets wind), guilty for every glass of wine I drink, guilty because I get angry at a totally dependent and tiny little baby in the middle of the night, guilty because I don’t get up immediately and hover between sleep and waking wishing he would just go away. Guilt, however, is a fairly useless thing in the bigger scheme of things. It does not make a better person of me for experiencing it. Nor does it make me any more evil or useless than I may already be. It just wastes the little energy I have left. Sometimes I even feel guilty for wishing that I could write about things other than the baby all the time. Motherhood: The all consuming change.

One of the main sources of maternal guilt is the vast collection of baby magazines and books that form the cornerstone of parental reading material. No more trashy fiction, serious fiction or non-fiction. No. The only reading material any worthwhile mother consumes go by names such as ‘Ons Baba’, ‘Fit Pregnancy’ and ‘Sister Lillian’s Baby Companion’. Don’t get me wrong, Sister Lillian is a saint and I’m sure the journalists that pen the articles in ‘Ons Baba’ all love their kids. But life is not like the magazines and even when they condescendingly tell you that it gets tough and that you may be suffering of postnatal depression if you have thoughts of harming yourself and your baby, it doesn’t help for the guilt. I have a nauseating tendency of channelling my guilt into anger. This does not help either. God help the editor of ‘Ons Baba’ if ever I meet her.

So for now I save my guilt up for bad poetry and dreams that drench up all the times I have carried my load of guilt into my relationships. What fun I have at night. The miracle of my life is a mess at times. But then I remind myself that the joy still outweighs the guilt. And that the hope I have outweighs the sum of them both.