Cape Town
It is a busy place, Cape Town
filled with new housing and more cars and more roads
filled with family and friends and generosity and warmth and shared meals and old memories
shared holidays and celebrations and places we have been
and where to go and what to see and what to buy and where to live
Gleaming shops filled with new things that I didn’t know I needed
things that make life better?
and I buy 3 pairs of baggie trousers,
(and even though Pat tells me it looks as if I have dirtied my nappy from behind,
I am, nevertheless, pleased at this new casual comfort)
Most days I watched the early morning sea
sitting on the rocks below towering mountains
where the elements converge
in rushing winds
and silent mists
and sudden heat from unfiltered sun in deep blue skies
ancient granite rocks overlaid with ancient sea beds
overhang the ocean
and here – in this unlikely, unwelcoming place
blown by furious flattening winds
scorched by burning afternoon sun
watered by far flung spray
8 different kinds of flowering plants have made their home
a tenuous holding
fibrous roots into cracks of crystallized infertile rock
- and a line of minute black ants
march in earnest, focused direction
across the granite wall behind me
life is everywhere – ready to answer the challenge
in their still deep silence the old spirits of the mountains
are slowly shifting
as a frill of encrusting houses and mansions and apartments
scramble up its slopes
fill valleys that were once the passage of wind-blown sand,
and hundreds of thousands of temporary shacks
grow and spread
out there, on the sand dunes
and on the edge of wetlands and slopes
- housing for the homeless
The old oaks planted by long gone settlers
begin to grow diseased and old
The sea begins to bite into the coastal railway line
and sand blows up the streets covering the edges
These rocks, and mountains and beaches have moved with the slow pace of time
over millions of years
a small piece of Africa jutting out towards the south pole
covered in feinbos
a community of plants found nowhere else in the world
and at the time we begin to realise how precarious is this land
and finally recognize the call to hold this place sacred
- small places on the tops of mountains and the edge of unreachable coasts
we pour in, regardless, in our millions
trying to control the inevitable, eternal migration of mountain and sand and sea
and battle with the problem of living in a way that creates least harm
Back home it is tattier
less comfortable and predictable
where the challenge of interacting with the chaos is more visible
and I feel once again the edge of anxiety
and to the thrill of riding the wave
Back home to the family and the community and the sad absence of Pete
the familiar trees
and the space and the noise
and the call of the Tinker Barbet and Heuglins Robin
and the knowledge of friendships in far places
and 8 different kind of plants hanging of the rocks at Noorhoek