A walk through these empty rooms #poem by Abigail George

 

   Look, it is autumn. Autumn
    rain. It is the beginning of a
    brave new world. You don’t
    understand me. You love me,
    you say you do, but you don’t
understand me. I know of psychiatrists,

    illness. Disability. I know of
    medicine. Blood and water.
    Cold flesh. ‘Just go black,’
    my mother says. It is fasting
time. Lightning and thunder in my body.
    I always have to wait for the

tiredness to lift to do anything of importance.

    The autumn chill is in the air.
    The breakfast wasteland of it all.
    Things of bittersweet regret.
    The tap roots are enormous.
    I knew a boy called Julian once.
    He played the guitar. I wonder
what he is doing now. The girls

that he dances with. The girls that he kisses.

    The heavens opened up. How to forget.
    Bees and mist dance on the surface
    of the earth. Darkness is lifted. Granite is trapped there.
    The same way that case studies
    are trapped in caves in high care.
    Instinct tells me that I can’t touch
    love. That I can’t touch the sun.
Branches have the autumn chill inside them still.
    This is a post-apartheid river.

The people here are lonely and sad.
    Precocious and intellectual.
    In a land faraway, people are
    on the move. They are getting
out of bed. Waking their children, taking showers, fixing breakfasts, fixing their hair.

    I am so attuned to it now. Drinking
my coffee to birdsong. It is morning and sanctuary
    is no more for now. ‘Please love me,’
    I said in my youth and my twenties.
    Now I am saying, ‘don’t forget me.’