Dream

Hand in hand,
they walk the afternoon,
and I watch you greet as old friends
the people of a poetry so narrow -
just a straight conduit
between birth and death -
beings right between
the born and the made,
people of the stars
come to bury their dead
in the Cradle,
to guard over
the many masks of god,
with an amazing gift
for naked communication.

And you, dreamer,
who sang the sun’s flight,
who watched melancholic
as clouds covered its ascent
and then - bathed in awe
that felt like music, that smelled
like jasmine and beetroot -
a world suffused
in a joker’s play on pink
as if sunset were just another way
of breathing out,
beginning again,
but this time with a people
who walk the ledges, the layers,
the liminal space in songs of suffering
that bubble up like fragrant undertows,
all of us adrift on a dream designed
to discover the kind of love
that could even conceive
of singing the sun’s flight,
of holding happiness right here.
Eternity not in the palm,

but between, as it began:
hand in hand.

TRACE

Dream State

Jitterbug Perfume

Maropeng