Thomas’ Herd

The cattle came last night,
right as I opened the door and stepped out,
no moon to warn me of their presence,
just the other-worldly sound of their hooves
on the tar road home and the smell of their hides,
which cannot be found with words,
pouring as it does through every sense
until no-one who knows it would dare say
what it is that it makes us remember.

I stumbled back in after they passed
and slipped into a dream that drifted with them,
of school buses and Sagrada Familia
and lying down next to an elephant
who let me work out the knots in her back
before becoming an old woman I knew
from a music video, and all this memory
come flooding back through my fingertips
in ways which the body cannot forget,
though I am unclean and made of dirt and dust
and a dancing light which will not be doused.

This morning I sit and read again the scriptures,
but it was the dronga who dragged me back
to awareness with her awkward greeting
as I walked down to the beach,
and it was the weaver’s palace in a thorn tree
which drew from me a real bow,
for there is no book better than this.

Here is what the cattle taught me,
caught as I am in the smell of grass
and dung and a green life in time.

Traces

Tshona!

I’ve read this script and it’s custom fit