In spare yet sure strokes, Lucretia Pretorius conjures up a childhood in rural Canada, where sentient trees and winter's aurora borealis silently wove themselves into a young girl's imagination. All, alas, left behind when she moved with her husband and infant daughter to South Africa. To a barren land, alien culture, and loveless marriage.
Even so, meadows and trillium-carpeted woods can never be truly left behind. They are very much present, along with the people and places of Africa she came to love, in the verse of a woman who refused to be crushed by a life-time of departures.
In Woods
In woods, after winter
when wet winds blow,
walking, I kick aside November’s brown oak leaves,
discover the first bloom,
Spring Beauty, rising
out of black, snow-drenched earth —
five water-coloured petals
on stem so frail you’d think
the weight of one oak leaf
would break it.
I kneel awhile, then
walk away and leave it there
among rough leaves that soon will shift
and hide it from the light.
Exorcism
I answer you, faces
appearing unwelcomed
from my purgatory memories.
I do not fear you now.
Say I was awkward,
foolish, naive.
Yet I could sing more beautifully
than any of you.
I thank you now
for your tormenting
that brought a certain anger
together with the pain
and made me grow
while you stayed small.
And I can sing more beautifully
than you can understand.
Cancer Ward
Four to a room,
or rather, a window
that she and I and the other two
watched, before she died.
We thought the nights would never end
or black sky grow pale.
We listened to each other,
every sound important.
Some small thing it was
happened in an instant,
revealing us
as sisters.
I got up from my bed
and walked away from them,
slowly,
afraid I would forget.