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.