Category: Poetry

NaPoWrimo 2014 Catch-up

I’ve been away for a few days, out in the tempered bush of a game reserve in the Eastern Cape, taking pictures of animals at cautious distance and ignoring my emails. I also attended the ceremony where I graduated with an MA in Creative Writing from Rhodes University. It was the culmination of a two-year part-time programme where I made the enduring acquaintance of a group of accomplished writers who will all soon be landmarks on the SA literary scene. As for myself, I am nursing the bereavement that comes from being delivered from the womb of thesis supervision. Despite the officially embossed paperwork, I am still grappling with my place as a writer, but more on that in another post.

While I saw and smelt much poetry out in the green, gold and blue of bushveld and seascape, I wrote none of it down. And this is why I have nine poems to write before I clear up my NaPoWriMo backlog.

Here are five of them as a start.

 

 The Poet’s Dilemma
Saaleha Idrees Bamjee

I never know where to break a line
or when or if in fact it should be
broken at all to create a pause a breath for the reader
a kind of rest for the eyes or if this is being read aloud
a space to sip at water without flushing the rhythm
so carefully composed.
When a poem comes its through an open tap puddling till all I can do is float in it.
This breaking of lines sounds savage sometimes the cracking of eggs the splintering of timber
bone china in pieces on the floor.

 

The Old Lion
Saaleha Idrees Bamjee

I watch the old lion watching the herd.
The zebras smell him,
they’ve turned their heads to look.
There’ll be no clanging of the food chain today
and he shuffles off through the veld.
I’ve seen him before in a supermarket aisle,
staring for fifteen minutes at tins of baked beans,
the trolley empty, longing for his wife
who did the grocery shopping.

 

Elephants
Saaleha Idrees Bamjee

Yes, giraffes are elegant, obviously.
It’s that neck, and their legs, all slim lines and graceful
silhouettes photographed against saturated skies.
But have you watched an elephant walk? Have you really
considered their grand compacting of the ground beneath them?
Their balletic paces, unplodding gentle treads
hinged on judiciously oiled knees,
they barely seem to emboss the grass.
We always think big things unwieldy,
giants must be clumsy, skinny is everything.

 

During a Reading
Saaleha Idrees Bamjee

The pause is most pressing
when a poet loses their place.
The poem hangs over the room
its bladder fully pinched
the listeners shifting in seats
holding in the expectancy
clenching their attention
for when the poet finds himself on the page
any moment now.

 

Pick-up Lines
Saaleha Idrees Bamjee

Hey beautiful,
I want to build a life
on that bone structure.
Have your zygomatic arches
hold up the roof to a home,
the walls papered with lyrics
from our song.
Your hair could weave
a winter warm.
Curtains fall
when you close your eyes
dark enough to dream unfettered
and the room fills up
with all of you.

Fare Well Madiba

This Is The Autumn Of Our Hearts
(Goodbye Tata)

This is the autumn of our hearts.
The gentle slipping
of the leaves, the letting go of trees
to a ground tilled 27 years and more.
The turning over; agitation
of minds, succouring of conscience,
the soil is now ready to receive.
This son has set. It is for
other suns to rise.

Poems in Other Places

The Geary Street apartment, San Francisco
Published Loop #2 (Tearoom Books)

Life leaks through the walls
slips in through the window
along with the theme from Braveheart
and the colicky baby
pee finding porcelain
two flushes
a cough some guitar chords
canned laughter bubbling under the paint.

—

I’ve been added to the Badilisha Poetry X-Change. Click through to my profile here: http://badilishapoetry.com/artists-profile/276/
Listen to a podcast of me reading Dear Katy, along with Malika Ndlovu’s commentary, here: http://badilishapoetry.com/radio/saaleha-idrees-bamjee

Arabic Lessons in Egypt

Published in Poetry Potion 2013.01.Print Quarterly edition: On Being Human

 

Arabic Lessons in Egypt

At a masjid in Madinat Nasr
just before Maghrib
I find jidatee with her nose
in His signs
while a metronome
of bone on bone
keeps time with
each fatha
each kasra
she breathes
those knees creak as much
as the scuffed plastic
of the chair under them
she’s not really my grandmother
I hear only one word out of her hundred.
Ana la atakalam arabiyya the guidebook told me to say.
Ana talibah, min junoob iffrikiya was from today’s class lesson.
jidatee, who’s not really,
fingers the dark cloth of my jacket
before pointing to my skin
she’s trying to figure it out
South African but you are not black?
Ummi’s ummi’s ummi min Hindeeyah I stumble
I haven’t yet learnt the Arabic word for great-grandmother
jidatee brings her finger to her forehead
makes a little circle with it in the middle
La, la, Muslim I say
sounds a bit like a song
and we laugh before we pray

–

 

Translations:
maghrib – the sunset prayer
jidatee – Arabic word for ‘my grandmother’
fatha – Arabic grammatical mark
kasra – Arabic grammatical mark
ana la atakalam arabiyya – I don’t speak Arabic
ana talibah, min junoob iffrikiya – I am a student from South Africa
ummi – Arabic for ‘my mother’
min Hindeeya – Arabic for ‘from India’
la la- Arabic for ‘no, no’

Dear Katy

Dear Katy

I was told you are buried in the row

alongside the highway

under a tree

along the fence I walked to them

reading names heavy with someone’s longing

none of the Khadijas I found were you Katy

I saw a man with a prayer book in his hand

standing as still as the trees and

I didn’t want to break what he had by the

leaves that would have crushed under my foot

and I left

not having found you

but knowing that the prayer I sent from my car

will get to you somehow

we could picnic in your cemetery

the sweeping spaces clipped green

and neat

the benches good for cupping us

between the hum of traffic

and the slow hush of grass

sectioned off by census of faiths

in death too we choose to lie close to our own

you would have told me so

perhaps it is that when we rise again

it will be among comforting commiserators

or if we did happen to call upon God by a rightful name

there’d be no rubbing our neighbours’ noses

in more dirt than they were accustomed to

red mounds of heaped soil for most Muslim graves

green perspex stenciled names

prayers for the highest stages in Heaven

among the few entombed and headed by

granite supplications more adamant

and then there are some with a clutch of

scratched-on plywood sticks

like plant markers

these grave gardens

grief wistfulness tend

careful beds of succulents

blooms flourishing both wild and contained

in pots and vases like

ornaments in your mother’s display cabinet

I will return to look for your tree

in this nursery of loving wives devoted husbands

dear friends and fallen angels

I will look for you  in the golden hour

when the day draws over your grave

gentle and warm God tucking you in for the night

and it feels like we’re nearing

the end of something perhaps

a hope that Death will not sneak up behind us

but walk towards us giving us

time to prepare.

Prayer

Prayer

I seek you out
in the cradles of hands
between the creased ditches
and the padded mounds.

My thumbs are search parties
covered in prophets’ ink
rubbing through piles
on prayer mats.

In a palmful of Joburg snow
children see you clearly.

Growing Bones

Published in Poetry Potion 2012.04 (5th Anniversary Edition)

Growing Bones

First soft and unknit
to mould through mothers
to begin this work
of hardening frame
growing upwards
to fall free when six
from the top of the world, fracturing fear
and breaking in three places
casting a school-term in plaster
scribbled on in fruit-scented markers.

Bones, I drink to your strength.
The milk, always, in tall glasses
good for glugging in one go
and skillful lickings
of wet-white mustaches after.

Under stretched-out bras and holy panties,
I scribble bones into perfumed diaries
that close with a heart-shaped lock
pickable with a paper clip.
Bones, you make good backs
built to bend
under the weight of adolescence
and spring up
when
the world becomes
ready
for a woman.