Strangers in our own country:
I heard her call out.
That’s what we were,
in a city not our own, not anyone’s.
Every second March
it belonged to the summer-dress clad foreigner,
the artists,
the makers in their vulnerability,
yours and mine in wonder.
It was the afterwards of a bloody week,
of a phone call made across states
to mourning parents in a hospital room.
A grief unfinished upon another.
Under that coastal sun
we saw white clothes blowing in the wind
clipped to wires across the verandah,
The smell of sea-salt settling in our hair.
Our lives stopped mid-rotation, mid-sentence;
the only tether
was the humidity lingering,
the sweat traveling on our skin.
The sun: the ruler,
Who did we think we were? Walking the streets
as though we owned them?
Graffiti bigger than the walls,
We were being watched, I knew it.
Thrown into the
room of catastrophe, stripped of our bravado
Walls covered in mirrors,
furniture suspended mid- air,
Who are you in the midst of disaster?
We stepped lightly among everyday things
scattered, a metal shelf rusted
beyond repair:
in the aftermath of a tsunami,
As if we weren’t already drowning.
For some time, it stopped
the dread and the throbbing,
The blood in my head.
It all froze.
