The Summer We Didn't Die

Christine Coates

Description

The Summer We Didn't Die is Christine Coates' third poetry collection. It is an assured, tender collection that offers the reader a way to think about the mysteries at the heart of what it means to be human, in this place and time.

Sujets

• Poetry
• List of African writers by country
• South African poetry
• African people
• African

Informations

• Publié par: Modjaji Books
• Date de parution: 08 octobre 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781928433347
• Langue: English

Extrait

The Summer We Didn’t Die
The Summer We Didn’t Die
CHRISTINE COATES
Published in 2020 by Modjaji Books
Cape Town, South Africa
www.modjajibooks.co.za
© Christine Coates
Christine Coates has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work.
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, mechanical or electronic, including photocopying or recording, or be stored in any information storage or retrieval system without permission from the publisher.
Edited by Arja Salafranca
Cover text by Megan Ross
Cover artwork by Christine Coates
Book layout by Andy Thesen
Set in Garamond


ISBN print: 978-1-928433-02-6
for Anne Schuster (1947–2017) writer, poet, teacher, mentor, friend
Contents
1. The summer of ’69
Learning to drive
The summer of ’69
Summer storms
Western Transvaal farm visit
Agricultural show
End of a sentence period
Unsteady ground
Awakening
Mothering: a pantoum
My father the movie director
The sky above me
City swim
Skin
Fig tree with Ma
Ensure
Throwing bones
A moment at the bus stop
First weekend
Carpet
Salt
Excavate
Scars
2. the summer of fire
The garden – a poem in five movements
1. In the beginning
2. Fires
3. Renewal
4. Drought
5. The mourning dove
Summer fire
Evidence
The thirst
The dry
Watering bees
Newlands Spring
3. threnody for summer
Threnody for a queen in four parts – an opera 40
1. Queen Lear
2. The girl
3. A game of chess
4. The collapsed mother
Why should I hesitate
Shoes in Sandton Square
4. to the islands
Tears for Medusa
Story stones
The Blue House
Molyvos
Journal in France
A visit to the paradise
Road back to Klerksdorp 
Ikageng
Mapungubwe
The Marikana March
Being the Second Wife
5. summers of life
Body map
Birds
Night walk
Surfing lessons
Self-portrait as a mermaid
Change of life
6. the summer we didn’t die: Corona
Quinces in the time of corona (a cycle)
1. The week we picked quinces
2. Second picking
3. The butterfly effect
Lockdown diary
Baking bread
Bridge
Sixty-seven minutes
Fire pit project 
Fire tales
Lockdown moons
1. Easter Moon
2. Grandfather’s moon
3. Moon in June
4. July moon
5. August moon
Drinking in lockdown
The year the animals come closer
How to fold a paper bird
1. The summer of ’69

Learning to drive
I steer down my mind’s road
not knowing how to brake,
I dead-eye the destination
I cannot reach.
I wear my grandmother’s bones,
like cutlery, cruise past a photograph –
an infant in a wicker chair
chews the end of a loaf.
I’m on a joyride, round and round
the moon. Mother’s hair is feathers.
I wish I could stay like this
forever, never arriving.
There are gifts in everything
that hurts us. Oupa wears
his face behind his eyes,
shadow puppets on a screen.
I swerve past a rock fall,
my father is all over the road.
I gather his pieces,
put them in a basket.
We stopped saying his name –
that’s how one disappears.

The summer of ’69
That summer we didn’t die
we cycled out of town into the country,
we braaied sausages by a stream,
walked across the narrow culvert.
The river dropped away, a hundred feet below
but I know how memory shrinks and expands.
That summer we didn’t die
we went to the beach all day, our bodies
tingling from sea and sun.
A bluebottle stung me and you took me
to the dunes and peed on my leg –
it was the most natural thing to do.
Later you made us all dinner, and when
the others were sleeping and my mother passed out
from too much wine, we sat on the bed,
your hand up my shortie pyjama top, a whisper of
a touch, then an eager puppy pulling at my nipple.
Is this very bad, I asked, that summer we didn’t die.
It was the summer my father died,
my sisters ran feral like baboons when the leader is killed,
but we didn’t die that summer –
we danced to Dickie Loader and The Blue Jeans,
we French kissed and
your hand progressed to inside my panties.
That winter we listened to the moon landing;
leaving Klerksdorp was a greater challenge.
The sixties were ending – you left for a job in Joburg,
called to say you’d bought a red Alfa Spider.
I never saw it; you’d written it off without scars to show.
I met a boy with a blue Capri and another with an old green Morris;
the next summer I was riding with boys in cars.
But that summer we didn’t die.

Summer storms
The white noise lulls me,
thunder lifts my ear,
wind sweeps the topsoil,
fills the town with dust –
not the dust devils we’re used to
but windstorms –
from Wepenaar to Wolmaransstad
it settles in our lungs.
Oupa says decades, a lifetime of soil.
Whose lifetime I ask –
his seventy-six years or my scant seven.
Our world is blown away,
only grey scrub bossies
cling to the earth.

Western Transvaal farm visit
Tractors, tools, tyres, body parts, hubcaps,
Oldsmobiles, Fords, Chevys,
roosters crow in the heat, flies.
Clumps of blue gums, cement dam,
boys go round and round,
we swim the whirlpool.
Ouma’s rusks and thick sliced
bread, appelkooskonfyt.
Jannie’s cut his finger, it drips
as I take my first bite of the bread,
red on yellow
and I can’t eat farm butter again.
Smell of lamb roasting in the Aga,
potatoes in duck fat, sweet cinnamon pumpkin;
Oom Henk’s beard has food caught in it,
I can’t finish my lunch.
We nap the heat-hazed afternoon,
brommers buzz around our food coma.
I wake thinking it’s morning,
but outside boys are taking pot shots at
pigeons. Purple clouds burst,
drops make little craters.
I hear plops as the rain bursts