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Abridged
A New Ulster
Wordlegs
Crannog Magazine
Every Day Poets
www.everydaypoets.com/dark-parkour-by-sue-morgan/
The Galway Review
www.thegalwayreview.com/2013/01/27/four-poems-by-sue-morgan/sue/
Crannog Magazine
Poetry24
www.poetry-24.blogspot.com/p/poets.html
Southword Literary Journal Issue 22
www.munsterlit.ie/Southword/Issues/22/morgan_sue.html
Static Poetry Volumes I - V Available from Pill Hill Publishing
To hear me read some of my work go to audioboo.fm and search suemorgan
Pennisetum clandestinum
(African Grass)
Mary, I think you would be right to say
that the tokoloshe bit off my tongue
and took away my words of gratitude.
And now, the sangoma has stolen into my house
and stuffed my head with memories
until I have to say that I am sorry.
I hear you tread softly on kikuyu,
tap my window to wake me in the cool African dawn.
We walk the red dust road
and you watch for the glossy, grass-green mamba
who lives in the bus-stop gum tree,
hand me polished shoes so I am smart
as I board the morning bus to Benoni.
And, at the end of the day, how I love to see
your wide, wide body sway its way to meet me.
Then I see you, arms in a steel bath under the baobab tree
where you wash my yellow dress in suds of ‘sunlight’ soap,
leave it acacia pinned in the scorching heat.
Did you know that they seized us that day?
They said that Father should never have taken
a sick, Xhosa woman in a car without a chaperone.
They said that he had already been warned,
properly, with nightsticks,
about the error of teaching Samuel, a brown boy, to read.
He should have known it was wrong, they said.
But he didn’t,
so they put us on the ‘plane at Jan Smuts –
no time for farewells.
wish I could have said goodbye.
Shown my love in a hug. Said that I would miss you.
Now, I am forty years late with the letter.