My mother holds in her right hand

a cane that holds her up. And weight
from the memory of nineteen seventy.
Long after the sun has died,
even as death weighs and smells her
like a buyer in the fruit section at Shoprite

among the melons, grapefruit
and mangoes
trucked from another country’s clemency,
she shuffles through the hallways of our minds,
opening doors to rooms to make windows in there
let air in to chase torpor away, aware
of the presence of the buyer of lives.

Sometimes she finds that going in
and touching old things brings the self
peace. Sometimes she just sneers from the door,
peering at the blankness with her mind.
The empty rooms cower in corners.

She totters along memories that link
dying and living rooms, into a den we meet in
for matters of grave significance,
shaking the earth with us till those that lie
at the bottom of this country
come up for a while
for air to deaden their wounds.

We had talked the other day about heat
that beats skulls; yesterday
about going to weed the graves,
the same that cling to us like newborns
and for which our heart burns.

One day we shall cut every tie with them.

Her oyster eyes gleam at the prospect,
her face an anchor beyond the vile thing.
Soon we will sit again at the table of departure,
when the time for me to leave arrives,
regarding each other and
re-living things.

Before my last day we’ll go to the graves
with spades
and rakes
to clear the edge, weed the perimeter
around each slab, then rinse our hands and utensils
in lekhala juice, before the lone walk home,
the way those men had left, that time
before the last dawn of Qoaling
after they had dipped Motlatsi in blood
and written the history of our family with his name—
though not before they’d wiped
their hands and tools with his bedclothes.

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'M'e 'Makananelo Masilo