Today is the third day that South Africans are allowed to escape the confinement of their quarters. While Dad opted to linger under the sheets, Mom and I donned our masks, rolled up our sleeves to ensure a slight of sun on our blanched skin, and set out before NDZ's 9am curfew.
Mom's womb remained barren beyond her twenties. She surrendered to her fate until, by some small miracle, shy of forty, the river of life turned back and she found, sprouting within her belly, the seed of a boy that almost forty years later would walk with her along the Hennops River and say,
Let's pause, Mom.
...Here. Here in the morning sun, on the bank of this river.
Take this earphone, place it in your right ear. I'll take the left. Share with me this tiny space on planet earth, this brief moment.
I pressed play and waited for the words of the poet to stream towards our ears.
Mom became a woman in the world of the Afrikaner. A world in which vulnerability was never tolerated and tenderness was rarely witnessed. But in the glimmer of her personal armour was the evidence of a secret longing...
...a longing to be seen. Naked. Unarmed.
We stood, caught in the rush of the waters. The river of life passed from her, to me.
Poet Marie Howe's words settled gently in our spirits. The wind ruffled the tree tops. The azure sky reached into the darkness of space. Time surrendered its inexorable drive...
“My Mother’s Body” by Marie Howe:
“Bless my mother’s body, the first song of her beating
heart and her breathing, her voice, which I could dimly hear,
grew louder.
From inside her body I heard almost every word she said...”
...listen to the complete poem, as read by Pádraig Ó Tuama.
Listen, before the 9am curfew calls you back into your armour, back into time's inexorable drive into the future, unknown.
With love,
