When a giver of life
gives hers to the world, we should
listen for, and trace, the ingredient in her
that carries forward — it’s in the way
she lasts like a river, even at this late hour
past life and its impediments, past
frail moments and grand ones,
a child’s death there, a grandchild’s here,
the experience of God’s miracle of
arms that levitates you to truth.
She makes us see through her, past
our windshield into the storm, see
the subtle things that define her, showed the world
where we’re from, threw her out of and into
love with my father, circa nineteen fifty-five.
Thing is, she’s lying before us now on this
metal plate, silent as a black-and-white photo.
She doesn’t speak to us in words, but
through her body we watch life
seep into the linen, and drip through tubes as if
on a sky’s whim suddenly we need her soul
at this time to feed the world — it’s in the way
she enters the latticework and flows outward
along the conduits, the root’s route toward
trunk, limb, then upward to pleased leaves,
permeating as if a time of succumbing,
when her last drip drops, was coming
© Rethabile Masilo

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