A vernacular year it’s been

its walls laterite

              lime in its veins

its rammed-earth floor

embroidered with journeys

                     across dunes and tides

its roof honeycombed with fables

in which terracotta horses

                               take wing and dive

It began with a tremble in water

    clay and speckled loam

shadows

              flicked off the giddy wheel

From a line of light traced along the turning lip

of an urn

              beaded celadon flames

marking the way home

                                     we gathered ourselves

Sing to us

                months of passage

in a language not of slaves

sing to us of the will to shape

                                               never stop shaping

I never once saw any blood gush out

            from that marble lion’s mouth

not when a boy fell at the barricades

blinded by buckshot

those faces pocked with metal seeds

those faces blurring in nailed eyes

not when a girl falling on a balcony cried

      that flames had swallowed her heart

a fire engine drove right past

                                              bells clanging

The man who’s lost his parachute

picks a knife laid out on a tray of light

the way a lesser man might pick a fight.

He hurtles to market on a cart whose wheels

screech under last year’s backlog of rain.

Shreds of his tent flutter in the branches

of tapped trees. He holds the idea of that tent

close to his heart the way an astronomer might

hold in his mind a constellation of fugitive stars.

We shall meet again on the trapeze,

he tells me, and I won’t be wearing

my gravity-coloured tights.

I look away, catch him again

just about balancing

on his spectators’ raised eyebrows.

The dome is just an old man’s breath

choked briefly in the sun’s fist

                                                 and allowed to go.

You don’t hear the growl of dogs, the flutter of wings.

Last night’s rain has shocked this red earth,

pooling in the grass,

                  dripping

from the khirni’s filigreed branches.

Has the mercury fallen, you ask, is the rain gauge full?

Sun or storm, flood or enemy fire,

                                                       you go out to hold

the last gate in the world, the gate of System, against Error.

For the first time, you miss your step

                                                           among the headstones

of Turkish slaves who died, grew large in death,

unfurled their sails to become masters of the sky.

New clouds call out to be named but they can wait.

For now, let your voice meander, caressing the scrub

with green phrases.

                               Here’s where you pray

to the locksmith who threw his keys away and married

a river that courses beneath traffic, tar, loam.

He surfaces to drape

                    a fabric of pauses on the mottled red sandstone.

He’ll teach you to listen

                                      to angry peacocks,

to the anthems ringing in these rubblework walls,

to this falcon that’s nested in your open notebook.

You should leave now or you will never go.