I sat on the edge of the sky
heart moving the breeze
you by my side
on the edge of the sky
and the sun floated by
on the edge of that sky
and I could have leapt down
I could have taken the risk
on the edge of that sky
on the rise of the abyss
I could have fallen for you
could have floated away
on the edge of that sky
on that warm summer’s day

I sat on the cliff of the sky
swirling the ocean salt
of the moon and
I chose not to swoon
on the edge of the sky
on my vertigo of you
I held my surrender and
steadied myself
and tried to remember
my own special light
and my own special place
my spark to create
not follow your star
on the edge of that sky

And I walked to my hill
to my river
my valley
through my gully
of darkness
where the trees
blocked your light
roots twisted and
gnarled and
nothing was bright
and I dug in the soil that
was loamy and dense
and uncovered myself
and found all my sense

And I glanced over my shoulder
at the edge of the sky
where the sun was setting
and I was ready to fly

© Tanya Rosso @ Ordinary Poetry

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My grandfather was an architect trained in Holland in the early 1900’s before the world went crazy and wars erupted. He came from a long line of architects, who had been instrumental in constructing many of the buildings in Rotterdam, which would probably still be standing today, had the city not been decimated by German bombs in the Second World War. He missed all of that, by then he was living in South Africa and his job, at that point was the municipal architect in a tiny mining town called Springs. Post the war, the town needed to develop housing and his task was to design all the houses in the new suburb, as well as plan and design the suburbs recreational facilities like the swimming pool and tennis clubs. I imagine him sitting at his drawing table, hand drawing blueprints of houses, his precise lines, his mathematics and his perfect print laying out the suburbs that would later unfold. I wonder if he had an inkling that one of the houses he designed would hold his young daughters and that later his younger daughter would live there when she got married and in turn, her children would be born there?

A few weeks ago we sold this house to new owners, it had been in our family for 65 years. It rose off the paper, my grandfather had drawn it on. He probably had a pipe in the corner of his mouth as he drew it, puffing smoke into the air as he considered its structure. He would not have realised that he was not just drawing bricks and mortar and plumbing systems, but that he was drawing the space that would hold my mother’s childhood, my sister’s and my childhood and our children’s childhoods. Did he see us running through the garden to get away from the gnome we believed lived under the hedge? Did he know that the pine tree would develop a bump on its side that we would be convinced housed a miniature witch? Did he know that in the tiny ventilation brick near the front door, that I would park my little matchbox cars and that my sister and I would pedal our tricycles fiercely on the bricks outside the front door? Did he leave space in the plans for the graffiti we would leave as children? The giant spider my aunt etched into the internal concrete wall in the garage, that is still there today and the initials of three generations of heart targets carved behind the kitchen door? Did he know his girls would scratch their love hopes into the wall?
Did he realise that the angle of the back door in the kitchen was perfect for me to hide behind and water bomb my father as he finished mowing the lawn? Did he draw in a long line of furry friends who over the years found the house and added to the crazy energy? Did he plan neighbours who would become part of the family and did he draw cups of sugar and cup cakes being traded over the fence?

I am sure he had no idea as the ink dried on the plans, that he had constructed a place where generations of his would store their memories. Where our heart aches and desires would dwell and be realised. The new owners are buying a ‘fixer-upper,’ a place, where they will perhaps bring up their own children, If those walls could speak, what a story they would tell.

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Often it is not the big things that change our lives. But a moment that might have gone unnoticed or forgotten by anyone else, that rip the fabric of your thoughts and makes you re-evaluate your life, your views or what you may later do. Last night I had dinner in Sydney with one of my best friends. We go way back, to when our bodies were firm, our children were imagined and our ideals were being shaped. We were friends at Wits University, a liberal place in South Africa, in the apartheid years. We were reminiscing on life, as you do, with a fine glass of Australian wine and talking about how we have all ended up all over the world.

It made me think of when, did I for the very first moment decide that I would leave South Africa? My neurons scanned my memories and a scene filled my head. It was probably a 45 second memory that started my journey. I only left the country years later, but the memory is as clear as the day it happened.

I was seventeen years old. I had just left home and was living in the big smoke, of Johannesburg. Having grown up in a small country town, I knew that there was something wrong with the country I lived in, I knew of the injustices and I knew things had to change, but I was sheltered from seeing these things myself, first-hand. Johannesburg was slowly starting to allow blacks into restaurants and places that had previously been off limits by law. The law had not officially changed, but practices were starting to. My now husband and I went out for dinner together, in the centre of Johannesburg to Mike’s Kitchen on Rissik St. It was a great, grown up feeling going into the steakhouse, where the Carlton Centre towered above you and the city drummed to its own beat. As we walked in and were seated, a well-groomed black couple had just taken a seat in a booth. Six months into my liberal education and in line with what my parents and school had taught me, I was pleased to see that things were changing. What happened next shamed me to the core. The manager walked over and quietly spoke to the couple. It was clear that he was asking them to leave. The woman clearly did not want to and at first spoke quietly to him, but you could see she was asking to stay. He shook his head. She looked at her husband with tears in her eyes and said “Come, let’s go.” She stood up and then thought better of it and went down on her knees, she turned to the restaurant and her husband and crawled out of the restaurant saying “Crawl out on your knees, we are defeated in our own country.” I could not eat dinner that night. We left without ordering. I only wish I might have crawled out behind her, but at seventeen just walking out was a statement enough and my skin burned red that no matter what I did or stood for I would always be white and to some extent part of the legacy, even though I did not want to be.

© Tanya @ Ordinary Poetry

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I am not sure why I never asked you
The simple things
The things I knew that pained you
But defined who I am
I am not sure why I never asked you
About the snippets you
Momentarily shared
But then moved from
So quickly
As they seared your soul
And scarred your heart.
I am not sure why I never asked you
Of your saddest time
Your hungry life
The child longing for a war to end
We never spoke of the painful times
But the shadows lurked
On the edges of our conversations
And my consciousness.
I know why I never asked
The things I should have spoken
The stories are in my cells
Blood of my blood.

© Tanya Southey @ Ordinary Poetry

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Choosing a word to capture
meaning
Sifting through pebbles,
panning for golden words
that will describe the incredulity
of the inexplicable mystery of you.
Running the water
over the wooden pan and sieve
and allowing
the little rock words to settle.
Tossing out the stones of words,
like ‘ordinary’, that do not fit.
‘Celestial’ has gem potential –
set it aside in the pile
of exquisite possibilities.

Run the cool, clear water
over the tiny speckled rocks
of emotion and be vigilant
with compassionate eyes for
the one in a million word
that will hold the
essence – perhaps –
‘Mystical’, ‘reverent’, ‘transcendent’
‘consummate’, ‘gracious’,
‘deep’,
and ‘buttercup’, definitely
‘buttercup’.

© Tanya Southey @ Ordinary Poetry

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Life is busy, not just for me, but for everyone in the world it seems. Yesterday, I flew out of the office, still on the phone and punching emails out while I was in the cab. I needed to go and have my eyes checked. Like everything about me, my eyes have a quirk, one of them has never learnt to see properly and the other one sees so perfectly that “my affliction” was only picked up when I went for my learners licence when I was 17 years old. By then my brain had learnt how to see my way and apparently could not be changed. More recently, I have just acquired an added difficulty, in that my arms have become too short and I need glasses to read. So a complex check needs to take place to make sure I protect my vision as I toddle off into my middle years.

I arrived at the Eye Specialist and walked into reception, I duly filled in the forms and was told to go into a room next door to wait my turn. I wandered into the room and it was filled with people. I felt mildly irritated as I thought, “this is going to take long.” Then I noticed something different. It is not often that I am the youngest person in the room these days, but I was the youngest by far. There were about ten people in the room and they were all about 80. The room was quiet, but for a man who I later learned was 89, who was holding court in a sonorous English accent. He was an actor and he was speaking about his wife, whom he had lost 15 years ago when she was 64. She had been a well known actor in the TV soapie Neighbours. He was telling stories about their life in the theatre. His rheumy eyes were filled with nostalgia as he regaled how much he loved her and how while he still missed her, he spoke to her all the time and knew she was with him. As each person got up to be seen to and left the room, he shuffled up and took the vacated seat next to someone else and asked “Would you like to see her picture? She was beautiful.” People obliged and stories continued. It struck me how lovely being old really is, in some ways. You are allowed to do and say more or you have got to the point where you don’t care what people think. Just like very young children, the older people in our society, seem less inhibited and as a result the waiting room became a chatty, convivial place, rather than one where we were all paging through our magazines, silently harrumphing that it was taking too long to be seen to.

Part of my procedure meant that I had to have drops in my eyes to dilate my pupils so that the doctor could look into the back of my eyes to check that everything was functioning well. This meant a check first and then another wait in another room while the drops took effect. Once again, the actor and I were back in the same room. This time I heard stories of him being a navigator for the pilots in the war. He was really inspiring. Again we went our separate ways.

The drops meant that my vision would be affected for about two hours, so my daughter came to pick me up, as I could not drive myself home. I had told her to just come in when she got there and wait in reception. As I came out of my last check, she was alone sitting next to the actor, and they were chatting away happily, her face glowing as she grinned at me (my distance vision was fine, but everything close up was a blur). I paid and she said her goodbyes. As we walked out she said “Mum, I loved that man, he told me how he had just met his great grandchild and that she had been named after a baby who, his daughter had lost many years ago to a cot death and the family wanted to keep the name going and recognise and remember that baby, who was no longer with them.” It struck me then how everybody who had chatted to him had been changed by the experience, we chatted about him for a long time, he made us speak of love, of courage, bravery and loss. It was so much better than crazily flipping through a magazine. We should all take a leaf out of old people and tiny kiddies books, we are spiritual beings having a human experience and our aim is connection. It is how we grow. Finding the courage and time to connect needs to be conscious if we want to bring texture to our lives, rather than life being a boring waiting room!

© Tanya @ Ordinary Poetry

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My dad was well known for translating Italian idioms or thoughts directly into English. It used to make us laugh and sometimes shake our heads. He also had no problem speaking of his impending death. This started when I was about six. He was always very healthy, but if he got a cold or any minor ailment he would call my mother and in a croaky voice, say “Bring the kids.” We would have to sit on his bed and he would get teary eyed and say “You know your father loved you.” Initially this would make me fearful, as a teenager I used to get frustrated and later in life it was a quirk of his that made me smile. I knew he really did love us. In more recent years, he no longer needed an illness to speak of his impending death. Even though he was fairly healthy, every time I saw him or occasionally on the phone when I spoke to him, he would say “When I die, I leave the feather behind.” As I explored this concept with him, it seemed to boil down to his belief that his body would remain, but his spirit would move onto its next journey. Sometimes he said it so often we would joke and say “leave many dad, we will make a pillow.” We would joke, but we all dreaded the day that he really would leave the feather behind. This December I had the blessing of spending quite a bit of time with him. On many days, he told me that he was not long for this planet. Even though he was not sick, he was starting to get tired and of course, he added that when he died, he would leave the feather behind. The last time I hugged him and said goodbye, we both avoided the question of when I would see him again. I thought it would be for his eightieth birthday, in April this year. But I did not tell him that as I wanted to surprise him closer to the time. I had no idea that three days after landing back in Australia, I would be boarding another flight to Johannesburg to help my sister and my mother organise his funeral.

My mother fielded tribes of beloved friends and family and my sister and I ran around organising the funeral and administration. In between tears and laughter, we often mentioned that he had gone and “left the feather behind.” We planned his funeral, chose music (see link below) to walk into the church behind his coffin, wrote eulogies that all of us wanted to get up and say, including the grandchildren, who chose to speak, we hung the three oil paintings that my daughter had done of my dad as part of a school project in the church and we cried and tried to also celebrate his life and his big character and personality.

When the funeral was over, we followed the coffin out of the church and down the steps. As we walked outside, I looked down as I guided my mother down the steps and lying on the top step was one perfect white feather, with a small edge of grey. It was the most perfect feather, it looked brand new, not a feather that would have fallen out without a purpose. I bent down and picked it up.

My dad had left the feather behind.

© Tanya @ Ordinary Poetry

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The sky within
holds my sun
it holds my view of you.

The sky within
stretches for miles
and takes me back to you.

The sky within
may cloud at times
to free me from the pain.

The sky within
is crystal blue
when settling from the rain.

The sun may have set
for you, my dad,
the world may say you’re gone.
The sky within
holds you intact
and memories linger on.

Love you Dad.

© Tanya Southey @ Ordinary Poetry

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Dear South Africa

I write this with a heavy heart. You were my first love. I know I walked out on you fourteen years ago, because I felt you were impossible to bring my children up safely in. I worried about your ability to allow me to focus my energies on a higher purpose, rather than constantly looking over my shoulder to see if my doors were locked, my windows sealed and my handbag tucked somewhere obscure. I agonised on the day I stood in a gun shop, when the store owner was telling me that “this gun is great for ladies and could kill someone at three metres”. I remember so clearly putting that gun down and going home, shocked to the core that I had even for a minute considered buying something that was so against my principles. It was a turning point, where I realised my co-dependant love of you was going to harm me, that my adoration for your vast plains and warm seas could not justify the abuse you put me through. That my love for your rainbow people and the funny daily life that came with diversity could not save me. I packed ten boxes, my five year old and gave away my beloved dogs and left. My new relationship is wonderful, it has no abuse. I live in a place that is truly democratic and safe, bar global warming, potential terrorist attacks and economic shocks. The daily assault on my psyche has been removed and I can focus on other things higher on Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. Yet, somewhere, deep inside me, I always burned a candle for you. I still miss you. I hold a hope that my true love, my first love, the country that held my first breath would redeem itself and realise its own potential. That the amazing people who live in it and manage to buffer against its abuses might enjoy the peace and freedom other countries take for granted. I growled when others slated you, I defended your burgeoning democracy and hoped and prayed that you would turn around. I wanted you to prove me wrong. There were glimmers of hope that you would. Yet, today you passed your Secrecy Bill, reverting back to type. You are the same, regardless of whether you are Apartheid South Africa or the New South Africa. In your core, you believe that gagging your people and preventing free speech is okay. It has long been entrenched in your history. You are proving that the abused becomes the abuser. My only glimmer of hope now is that the Constitutional Court overturns your lunacy. But I am learning that hope has a long, unrequited love affair with you. Hope may be an old woman before she sees you again….

Nkosi Sikele Afrika, God Bless Africa…and help her rise above herself.

© Tanya @ Ordinary Poetry

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Before I open this debate, I need to caution, this is not a juvenile ploy to get anyone to beg me to stay on in the virtual village…

My bud and I have had a long debate about whether we should “Commit Facebook Suicide”. This modern phenomenon is fabulous, it has connected me with people I have lost touch with, it keeps me up to date with the minutae of the lives of those I love and it makes me smile. BUT, it also distracts me, I can get lost aimlessly wading through stuff, I use it to procrastinate and then there is the bit that all my thoughts, photos and things are stored and who owns them? No matter your settings, do you really know where all this is going? Yet there is this compulsion to “share”. It is all good and well with people you trust, but what about the people who have ended up on your FB, who never speak to you? The silent observers of your life? Are we encouraging voyeurs who don’t participate but who are up to date?

So the debate became could, you, would you commit FB suicide and deactivate your profile? I have friends who have. They found the interaction too impersonal, they felt like they stayed in touch with those they loved through other means. I admired their bravery. And then there are my friends who are vowing to never go on it. My friend and I were debating, do they have certain personality traits that we don’t? Is their need for privacy stronger than ours? Are we blurters who have found our forum? I guess, FB does feed my need to be sociable. I love it when I see or hear something funny and I can immediately share it with my peeps. I love that after leaving my birth country, I have this little virtual village that I can wander around in. I pondered this for a few days and decided I could commit the virtual suicide and switch it all off. But I realised with all things as it life, you need to be vigilant of your actions, don’t post anything you would not be proud of, living virtually is no different to living in the real world, not in 2011 at any rate and learning to manage this form of communication is as important as learning other forms effectively.

Finally, I laughed at the irony of the conversation when I got off the phone from having the debate and the first thing I wanted to do was go and update my status to “Should we commit Facebook suicide?”. I rest my case…

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