Time, passing

Time, passing – clinging and clayey
like the mildewed earth
in the fallow flowerpots
stacked in one corner
spider webbed
mottled like rusting skin
exposed too long
under the aging sky –

The lime thicket, untended all summer
puts unkempt caramel leaves to the air
that smell of fruit souring.

From the old cane chair
where I sit, sniffing the fermenting mist air
I watch the overgrown plot adjacent
unattended, caught in a prison term
fenced by choking wild grass
and writhing creepers
encircling a collapsed shack
its termite ridden bones
half eaten by the soil
and still-born concrete masonry
rising against a wasting horizon
like the grappling remnants
of some wounded mammal
of a lost epoch
encrypted in sedimentary rock.

And it’s another year,
another new sun,
already old.



 Time, passing.

After the funeral of the dead year,
already a memory, a bird—
frantic or ecstatic or gone mad
in the thickets—
hammered open my night

Full of verve,
sure of his pitch,
and Time, passing
levitated in miracle
and good news.

Then swift and deafening,
a staccato burst of raucous revellers,
silenced him.

-Rita Putatunda