THE GIFT

THE GIFT

THE GIFT

You brought me other worlds, here
where the fir trees stand, each one a mast
stepped in the noon basin of its shadow,
where the thatch in its stillness, thickness,
is laid reed on reed in the Christmas heat.

You gave me this hill-station, world
where each day the mountains parent a cloud
that goes husbanding its cloud-shadow
far below, across the high grasslands, far
into the afternoons of the African montane.

It was there again, in that high country,
that we could watch those clouds
go riding their own cloud-shadows
high over the logging roads, cascades,
back into the mountains fluted by their stone.

You brought a world that love returns
us to – the plains and their poetics, space,
piebald under the play of light and shade,
and that carry us even as they run,
their clouds dilate, evaporate,

far as the Winterberg, curving away into the south,
far as the Amatolas, Mountains of the Calf.