New Year Wish 2006

by Phillippa Yaa De Villiers

The stars were all just doing fine when with a whee of joy the sky fire spiders burst upwards and stopped just between us and heaven’s diamonds and exploded in candelabra of colours upstaging the stars which quietly went about their usual business, occasionally exploding and not at all impressive next to the fireworks. Nature is distant. Sixty million light years away a comet crashed into blackness and nobody knew so nobody could be bothered because right here (and charity does begin at home) we watched the spiders burn and die and reached for another whiskey and kissed the closest person and wished once again for another one thousand things or just one thing that would make us happy

Our wishes caught fire
Roared into space, exploded,
And rekindled desire.

How to stay warm in the city

by Phillippa Yaa De Villiers

The Yeoville winter evening
loves its people
skin to skin:
this seducing season that
stripped the trees now
tongues nipples into hardness;
charcoal breath caresses
naked necks and runs
its freezing fingers over faces;
strokes
the limbs with
intense
sustained
relentless
lust.

As the molten heart of day submits,
the city inherits
its transient gold,
but we resist the insistent evening’s kiss
with its
traces of death’s embraces;
we quit the cloying cold
for
our private and modular,
singular accommodations;
one by one
we blow to flame our comfort
and surrender
to domestic rituals:

Yeoville, imboula mountain
The lights of flats like embers.

La Villette, September 2005

by Phillippa Yaa De Villiers

The subway station:
empty eyes, the flaccid legs
of passive passengers,
invisible violence of silence in
this inhospitable home:
a transient family of
strangers speaking indifference
in seven languages.

Below a pouting nymph in crusted lace
sits a daughter of Allah, her face
framed by the sombre constraint of her faith.

Frozen images
entice her eye,
kitchens and lingerie
advertising intimacy.
Cold stares of
fellow passengers
denying her
humanity.

Rails clatter, and she rises to greet
the evening train, her eyes alive, meeting
this rushing tube of motion, exploding open.

The man’s divining eyes
turn over the pebbles of the evening faces,
discard them
till he finds her,
his everyday bride,
married to the moment,
their eyes
celebrate a union:
here, at last
they are
at home.

Kissing in Public

by Phillippa Yaa De Villiers

I want to see more lovers
kissing in public,
their mouths open,
eyes laughing,
hand-clasped buttocks
breast-to-breast,
naked love sandwich
garnished with clothes.
I like to see that
electric charge
as loving eyes cross the
silken
swathes of hungry air
to be together;
as lovers rise from the park pillow
sweep non-existent grass off each other’s
backs and bottoms,
hands all over
each other.
I want to see more lovers
creating islands of intimacy
in the cold sea of
eyes cynical
eyes prying
eyes envying:

waves throw themselves up to the highest cliffs
then retreat, disillusioned, to their sulky, salty self;
doomed to remain
on the continental shelf.

The River

by Phillippa Yaa De Villiers

One day the Hillbrow Tower started to cry.
Real tears poured down its sides
collected in the gutters,
and ran down Banket Street,
and when
the other buildings saw the tower's sadness
they started to weep in sympathy.
Soon the whole city was sobbing,
the tears joined other tears
and filled the depressions and valleys.
They covered the koppies,
and collected in City Deep,
cascading over Gold Reef City
flooding Fordsburg
and soaking Soweto.
They flowed until they became a river
that carried us into the night,
where our dreams grew
taller than buildings
taller than buildings