ode to a cape turtle dove

 

in the throes
of a bird life’s here or there
then, could you choose?
with life hinged on one option
out of the violent storm.
could there have  been another?

what other thicket? i know,
the greenbelt’s become
wood in a stranger’s fire.
a tired fight, not defeated
yet, with burners’ memory short
tinder, like embers, have grown eager

so, to a perch, the, that perch, under-roof
with a ,the, that dog drooling
with a taste for bird…

was this all?
no way out, no flight, space
nowhere to hide, sit.
no place in between
bird and dog with hunger
in a storm with no rest

in what murphy’s to offer,
a frenzied flutter would end
in a wet plumed clutch.
insatiable hunger resolved
to eat morsel to the feather
in the beating storm

the weather would subside
to the easy calm of a post-storm,
under roof, the dog licked a paw.
there was no choice, option
to weather the elements,
nowhere else than to die, a meal?

outside, a violent storm
under-roof, a cold and hungry dog
could you have chosen the latter?
in between the violence of winter
and the claw of a canine’s hunger,
you were not driven to the former.
!gda

Hangberg, Hout Bay, Cape Town - provincial government siege on land

the people of Hangberg, a community on the slopes of the mountains that form Houtbay, will be back in court on 8 February 2011, to hear their fate on the forced removal plans by the Democratic Alliance lead City of Cape Town administration and Western Cape provincial government. The plans entail forcing the people, with indigenous first nation people identities, off ancestral lands. Much of the land, appropriated under the various colonial conquests, already is in the hands of the rich, most likely white and more often foreign, landowners, who demand their lands be cleared of human squatting. hangberg had become a last resort, and now that small corner of the universe, runs risk of ceasing to be home to this fishing community, who might land in dusty Blikkiesdorp, described as a human dumping groung.