Always

The day you or I left

it was raining softly

I took someone’s 10 speed racing bike

into the drive

past the parked yellow datsun

past the side section of the garden

where red and starry eyed we smoked dagga

and had conversations with each other and the goldfish

you were there, and Porat, all of us poised on the edge

of the unknown, every path and possibility still available to us

Johannesburg, South Africa, 1981

everyone remembers a time and place

all different in their specificity, all the same in the receding hairline

of inaccessible private memory

it was the beginning of our decade of youthful struggle

we shot out of our second womb, Joburg's Jewish Northern suburbs

I to Israel

you ‘round the coast before 1st year BA with Dani and Simon Nkoli soon to be a treason trialist, 

then the state of emergency, WITS project com, defiance, demonstrations, detention, communes, gender role confusion

and the flowering vine Porat Yosef  to UNISA and then a yeshiva in the Gush

with torturous secretive creation and Betzalel and first gulf war, waiting with no gas mask for a missile to strike him at midnight where I met him, as if by chance,

on an empty Jerusalem street.

for me piety and secularism and trying to become an Israeli and trying to become a man

and the never ending search for guides and gurus strung together on a thread of repressed longing

as I searched for an outline to hold my watery being.

The rain drops fell with a soft and sweet finality

something was dying, something beautiful beckoned to be born

already pregnant, our lives inheld
Joburg and Jerusalem
Cape Town, Berlin, Sydney

degrees and cul de sacs
joinings and partings
children and funerals, fleeting pain and fleeting pleasures

and a deep abiding throbbing joy beneath the

fertility, sterility, the uncertainty

with therapy and root canal

prosperity, mmigration and divorce
and going away to come back

on the divine hamster wheel

those heightened days now seen
as enveloped in the soft mist of inevitability

could it ever have been any other way?

how inscrutably mysterious that I could not see forward

to what was coming

but can look back to see it was already there

like the mighty oak in the acorn on the mighty oak in the acorn

that hangs on the universe and contains it

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dagga - marijuana

yeshiva – theological seminary where Talmud is studied

Porat Yosef – see Bereishit (Genesis) 49:22 'Joseph is a fruitful son, [like] a fruitful vine by the fountain, with branches running over the wall.’

Betzalel – Fine Arts Academy in Jerusalem, named after the biblical craftsman Betzalel who helped build the tabernacle.

WITS – University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, site of much anti-Apartheid protest in 1980s

projects com – projects committee – organised anti-apartheid demonstration during the 80s

UNISA – University of South Africa

Gush – (pronounced Goosh) Etzion – a kibbutz that was established in 1935, its inhabitants massacred by the Arab Legion and Arab irregulars in 1948. New Israeli villages were established in the area after 1967  

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