Zonnebloem
Hold fast to dreams for if dreams die, life is a broken-winged bird that cannot fly – Langston Hughes.
Let me tell you how I fill my nostrils with home,
with the girls at the hairdresser, their teenage primping
and perms, pink curlers, hot tongs,
or the boys
at the barbers stopping by for a smoke and a shave
or short-back-and-sides,
and of the choirs,
crooners, jazz bands, their music before it browned,
of football teams and days in the park,
the bandstand and churches, gang fights
down this alley or that, preserved now
in black and white,
and let me tell you
of all the places we went between home and school,
home and mosque, home and synagogue,
I can point to them on the map,
and of baking
and braais or fires on patches of wasteland,
and of the junk and rubbish,
dust and old tyres, the whole wonderful
mess of it, of our teachers, crane-operators,
maids, nurses,
stevedores – fairyland.
You can see the street names here so we don’t
forget them: shepherd, lesar, clifton,
godfrey, parkins, arundel, hamilton,
windsor, tennant, cambridge, constitution,
join me in thanking the man
who saved them
from the bay, and let the other signs
remind you I’m not inventing.
‘I am every stone in this place of stones’.
Now throw open the doors, un-cramp this city
from pews and stained glass, let these voices
shout down the street
over yellow grass,
lumps of concrete. I can see bricks stacking up,
wooden stakes forcing their way
into baked earth. There’s the smell of creosote,
emulsion on the breeze.
Sunflowers are cracking tarmac.
*Kate Noakes divides her time between Paris and Caversham, Berks. She is a Welsh Academician and her most recent collection is The Wall Menders (Two Rivers Press).