The roll-back

Four launch/ reading events -
1. Hogsback (The Edge Mountain Retreat), 12/10/19;
2. Grahamstown (Reddits, Cafe D'Vine), 25/10/19;
3. Cape Town: Tokai (The Book Shoppe), 4/11/19;
4. Cape Town: Claremont (Exclusive Books, Cavendish), 5/11/19

Now, at my laptop at my parents' dining room table, I sit opposite my mother, quietly reading in her wheelchair. Her entire left side is paralysed and her body has as good as no independence anymore. She holds her lapidary brochure in her right hand. Flash photos of cut and labelled gems, displayed on royal red backgrounds, gaze at me.

My parents' presence at the Cape launch of Greater Matter at Exclusive Books, Cavendish, Claremont, on Tuesday was one of the most precious gifts to me personally.
"If I could, I would have got up and embraced you," my mother said.

Having had to have been so publicly present, both online and off, for the sake of marketing and selling my book, has felt unnatural, even stressful.

Don't get me wrong. I love reading aloud to people, I love intimate public events, which poetry readings mostly are. I love the microphone, which allows for whisper-soft words to slink into listener's hearts. And I love the fact that readers have bought Greater Matter and are being nourished by it.

But the tide is rolling back now.

I look forward to being in the arms of my beloved. I look forward to composing poems again, applauded by the stars and grasses. Perhaps more people will come towards me, who have felt themselves privately heard, or who are questing for more of the chime they sense hums in my book. 

There'll be further books, further readings, to build and nurture the "good/ By quiet natures understood" (W.B.Yeats, Prayer for my Daughter).

I thank Exclusive Books, Cavendish, and Eva van Belle for the photographs from Tuesday's launch.

Chalice (a hitherto unpublished poem by Norman Morrissey)

With the days so suddenly summery, hammocking in the cool Green Nook is possible again. And then, by some idle chance I happened upon this moving poem, more crystalline than any photograph could muster for the moment it captures; a poem I don't remember hearing or reading before, utterly humbling for the love my husband felt for me; and archetypal in the pure man-love it conveys towards a chosen woman -

Chalice

To see you rocking in your hammock
in the old place
(that once was a sylvan nook in the formal, dressed-stone

garden I had
before my heart broke
and the wilderness tangled in

like the jungle over a Mayan temple
but now has been
trimmed back into My-Lady's-Bower's sweet symmetries)

was to see an elvish thing
bobbing in a curled leaf
on a gentle stream;

it was to feel my dream of these past years
- you finding a haven
where your own heart's time

can brim over
to make this new home I offer you
with both hands on bended knee

fit chalice
for your heart's
welling abundancies

to
be
drunk from.

- Norman Morrissey

Us in the "sylvan nook". Photo taken by my mom.