Café Neo

So there we sat on the deck of the Café Neo,
two red-winged starlings showing up,
and the mist rolling in from the rocks across the way.

I pushed my bag, ready to spill its fullness,
under my spindly chrome chair
so that it could give nothing away.

You showed me your Web site,
brimming with complexities,
awkwardly brushing dust from the laptop screen.

I held the Windhoek lager coolly erect in my hand.
Your green eyes sized me up.
The combatative clink of bottle necks.

You pointed to the lighthouse, explaining how it beams code
to the ships beyond Robben Island,
warning them of danger on the reefs.

We ate plump olives,
dipped triangles of warm pita bread in hummus,
tried the tzatsiki.

With you, I felt like a small girl,
back from exploring,
safe, but not free, on her father’s lap.

Your voice hummed like a ship's engine,
as you showed me a photograph of your mother,
her face wry with an unknown sadness.

You signed the bill,
carefully, as if writing poetry.
We kissed goodbye.

Walking to my car, I saw a Cape Owl
dive from the haze of a rooftop,
deflecting a seagull.

- Sarah Frost

(featured in the poetry forum 06.04.09)

You stroked my face

Remember Father, how here the sky at night falls smokily down,
a humid cloth of cloud settling over the city bowl,
reflecting the orange of the harbour lights?

In the garden on the hill, a fruit bat swoops into branches,
quick as a heartbeat,
elusive as an unanswered question.

There in the dark, we say goodbye, and the man I want more than I can say
kisses my face on both sides,
his stubble a near-absent graze against my cheek.

The stranger drives into the unknown, while, indoors,
I listen to the insistent repeat of tree frogs, and lay my restless son down to sleep.
My fingers stroke love across his face.

I recollect the way you, my father, traced my forehead so,
when I was a child, with tenderness,
as when you held me during storms.

The smart of tears prickling like dry grass against a bare foot
for what came later, for what you did not do,
for the leaving, and the staying away.

- Sarah Frost

(added 06.04.09)

Before you were born

She looks up to find the moon gaping through black trees,
white light through the window blaring in her eyes
like the radio turned up too loud.

She’d forgotten it was nearing its fullest point,
her head down, washing the dirty dishes,
11pm, the night before her son’s birthday.

The cake she baked earlier burnt,
so she’s trying again, a ring cake
to bring to his class at school tomorrow.

Earlier, laying him down to sleep, she remembers her father,
telling her of jubilant birds sounding into the Oxford dawn
the day she came into the world.

Now, carrying the flame,
she finds words for the story of his birth,
words and memory mismatched.

Unable to describe the warm seeping womb water
flowing down her thigh,
his father driving her dreamlike beneath hushed blue skies to the hospital.

The oven rattles, a dark hot maw
The morass settling, finding form,
alchemy.

She remembers his pale philosopher’s face mysterious
as Saturn inside her, from the shadows of scan photos,
waiting to be born, assume orbit.

- Sarah Frost

(added 06.04.09)