Another World by Rethabile Masilo | Poems Rethabile Likes
Another World
by Rethabile Masilo
Distance is pleasure to feet. I walk up and down these streets
so long that snow touches my face with its fingers, as if
the street was a form of penitence and night its shadow;
the people I pass cast theirs across my monumental shape
like they know I left in the basement where this all began
your letters on a shelf, with the faces of their stamps shocked
at the speed at which the years move on. And this was
at the time our road was plain, and we lived love and found
distractions everywhere, like the day we did it in the Y of a tree
and you plucked a plum and ate it till you came. And so
I like the night; I like how it grows and how beyond it
trees flock in shadows of furious birds I move among
with the hand of your snow brushing my face.
We were always looking for distractions and one day,
at the end of evening, you took me down to the cemetery,
to encounter stone’s suspended light. Silence rustled dead leaves,
a forest of marble occupied our mind, gave it form, banyan
piercing the layers of our upper world with its stem, pondering
two who loved among its trunks. A boneyard is no place for death—
the unbreathing are a world waiting to rise again. You hold me
in your hand and knead until the dead, aroused, thump
the roofs of their graves. I like the night, its time, black
with the gleam of oil, dark as the meaning of another world.
so long that snow touches my face with its fingers, as if
the street was a form of penitence and night its shadow;
the people I pass cast theirs across my monumental shape
like they know I left in the basement where this all began
your letters on a shelf, with the faces of their stamps shocked
at the speed at which the years move on. And this was
at the time our road was plain, and we lived love and found
distractions everywhere, like the day we did it in the Y of a tree
and you plucked a plum and ate it till you came. And so
I like the night; I like how it grows and how beyond it
trees flock in shadows of furious birds I move among
with the hand of your snow brushing my face.
We were always looking for distractions and one day,
at the end of evening, you took me down to the cemetery,
to encounter stone’s suspended light. Silence rustled dead leaves,
a forest of marble occupied our mind, gave it form, banyan
piercing the layers of our upper world with its stem, pondering
two who loved among its trunks. A boneyard is no place for death—
the unbreathing are a world waiting to rise again. You hold me
in your hand and knead until the dead, aroused, thump
the roofs of their graves. I like the night, its time, black
with the gleam of oil, dark as the meaning of another world.
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