The Rust of Silence
While I wait for your words a heavy silence falls,
fills the space uninterrupted.
Easier indeed
to trust silence
than to trust words
though silence itself has rusted.
A Midnight Tale
These nights
following the children’s birth
you seek, dissatisfied,
within the nakedness you know so well,
my once unblemished beauty.
You are much repelled,
you say,
by a thickened body
and a belly criss-crossed with birthmarks;
my body, though, is unchanging,
you say
today, hereafter and forever more.
My voice, deep-buried
in the valley of silence,
mutters to itself:
True indeed,
your body is not like mine:
it proclaims itself,
it stands manifest.
Before this too,
your children, perhaps, were born
in many places, to many others;
you may be proud
you bear no traces of their birth.
And what must I do?
These birthmarks cannot be
repaired, any more than my own decline –
this body isn’t paper
to cut and paste together, or restore.
Nature has been
more perfidious to me
than even you;
but from you began
the first stage of my downfall.
More bizarre
than the early hours of night
is the hour past midnight
when dreams teem.
It is now, at this midnight hour
the tiger which sat quietly
within the picture on the wall
takes its place in my head
and stares
and stares.
The Contract
Always
my sister will repeat in anger
what Amma says more subtly: that I am to blame
for all that goes wrong
in the bedroom.
Everyday, in the bedroom
these are the first words to greet me: ‘So what is it, today?’
Often
they are
the last words, too.
From a thousand shimmering stars
pointing fingers accuse me of whoredom
– once again –
and counsels float into the trembling night.
The child-like sobbing of a cat unable to feed its litter
seizes me by the entrails.
You too
may have your complaints
but Time and our history make very clear
where I now stand:
To receive a little love
– however tarnished –
from you
To fulfil my responsibility
as your child’s mother
To buy from the outside world
my sanitary napkins and contraceptives
and for many other little favours
To hold a little authority over you
if possible
To strengthen what authority I have
just a little
In full knowledge of all this
my vagina opens.
