Dear...

Dear son, Dear child
              Where will you go once your lips
              have shed the heady yellow paw-paw juice
              and reality has gleaned the smile from chanting
              over jumping ropes?

              Your sun-bare feet in their bare baked ways, will they
              and your knees remember threading through the old man's swing
              while he squints from the baked verandah and the
              Hoopoe begs from the compost heap.


Dear Friend, Young man
                  With your rounded, smiling wife, white
                  Frangipani flowering behind her ear and
                  Golden resting halo on her hand

                  Her song skips through the baked-earth dust to you
                  the soapstone life adoringly engraved within, yours and
                  hers, mouths and vows and dreams
                  cast in nets beneath the violet Jacaranda


Dear Friend, Old Man
                  With your whitened pupils and the orange
                  Sky that greets you through the haze, your
                  Crackling laugh
                  The reception from some other-worldly satellite

                  Together we squint, threading dreams through the generation swing
                  and under the orange Avocado blooms, half-listen to the
                  softly velum footsteps from and to your pantry, to find the Nice biscuits
                  in the green striped tin where the fly nets take their rest
                  from your Whit leather hands.


Dear child unborn
              In the moments where he squinted, waiting to
              join his spirit to his shell,
              The chongololo and the blindworm
              whispered you to him.

              They rumoured you may not have been, the
              Frangipani not conceived her and
              Yesterday, tomorrow's reverie choked the orange
              Mandrake fruit to spit their blood on birthing skies
              and the fly net in the pantry will never know your name.