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By the orchard of Tasmania
you sat down and wept -
your exile a cool remote
island of apples and bohemians,
quaint, easy, world-end Eden
with a shortage of journalists,
perhaps even of news.
Flown out there without much choice
about your transplantation,
you withered a year or so,
made homesickness your home,
kept your hurt roots moist
in strangeness, absence, memory.
Then, taking in all that damage,
budded at last into your strongest poems,
these you sent to me, about becoming Tasmanian.
A while in turn I ached, resenting
a two or threefold loss -
you, bred in Germiston, Transvaal;
your shy girl's voice, finding its voice
in our companionable workshops over the years;
your new growing art,
achieved in another country
but still ours, a thing that mild
new empty land owes us, steals from us;
and worse than loss, the blind denial
of our truth and hope and meaning on this soil
implied anew in every friend's departure.
But now I discover poetry does change things:
yours transmutes not only your belonging,
complicates my deprivations with strange gains:
because, instead of homing to your new address
relieved and exculpated, sure of being wise,
you (obstinate unsensible mother
of saved little boys) dreamed
confusion, shed our platinum tears,
kept our dust on your shoes,
imported your losses, missed
in the antipodean poets you met
some uses for the heart we learn in Africa -
because your art of tearing images, grieving
cadences, your rooting up and unwilled
rooting in, involved not spurned
where you are from, it earths also me
into the foreign ground your root is healing in.
I live a little now among the humpy hills of New
Town in Hobart, and Australia's island's island has become
one piece with my piece of Africa
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