Abigail George
Johannesburg
Desire, grief and loneliness were rivals—
I think of the memoirs that I have written
Of excursions, of executions, of experiments.
How I mourned.
I mourned the nothing loss of him—
Like spies. Smoke. Fat of the land. Mirrors.
In my moonlight house. The forests
Are armed.
It was difficult. I saw him in things—
Exits. Then not at all. It took me a long time
To triumph over all things. In the end I saw
Heaven.
All lightning is a lake of silver—
Tonight there is only a portal to Hades.
I needed sunlight. It was a golden ticket.
Like any prayer.
I endure summer nights. I endure sorrow—
Endure her invited guests at the banquet.
The uninvited well I imagine their deaths.
Like childhood.
It is dark here. I am trying too hard –
There is a great fire within me like a sea.
No flowers grow here. No grassiness.
No books.
Burial lies behind the closed door—
Closure. The villagers are waiting in the barn.
I am not giving up my psyche’s souvenirs.
Gretel dances.
I tasted the syrup of the perfect ending—
Cold, malignant fish I do not accept you.
The assignment is a game of win and lose.
Lectures are given.
Give me the contents of romanticism—
The white rabbits are ruling the wonderland.
Memory is clouded. Images paralyse me.
The lamp is bright.
Abigail George is a Pushcart Prize nominee whose work has appeared or is forthcoming from Africanwriters.com, Birds Piled Loosely, Every Day Poems, Hackwriters.com, ITCH The Creative Journal, Literary Orphans, Modern Diplomacy, Ovi Magazine: Finland’s English Online Magazine, Peaches Lit Mag, Sentinel Literary Quarterly, Spontaneity, The Artist Unleashed, The Copperfield Review, The Voices Project, Three and a Half Point Nine, and Toad Suck Review, as well as in a number of anthologies. Abigail has received two National Arts Council Writing Grants, one from the Centre for the Book and another from the Eastern Cape Provincial Arts and Culture Council in South Africa.
This poem is not previously published.