is not what you arrived at:

            fluid, it moves            lava in a lamp

shapes change 	           pieces of time

                       breaking through –
the spaces of remembering      dark

            underground    for years –

now unpeeled 	             accretions

            of memory – hard and lonely
                       yet familiar: you reach into

            the straight streets       bleak

                                    like brittle cracked leather

the edges of suitcases 	             you didn’t pack –  
memory           a finding again            of losing –

the sadness was there 	            black lives

                                    crushed like leaves –

each day they’d place

            one foot in front of the other. 
How much we did       or did not do –

            eyes averted to the ground

                        not seeing their faces

                                                 as we passed –

            holding the boundaries

                       of our bodies too close.
Home: what was lost, yet known,

                       roads, pavements, houses

            built only in designated

            White Group Areas 	the outer fences

obscure as smoked glass         maps unseen,

                       the legal prose of Ordinances – 
Acts of declaration: this is how the spaces

            of the country will be allocated –

                       ratios of tens 		to thousands

            the widest planes, the richest rock and water,

                       trees, the mountains in purple light –

                                    given to the minority –
a home  	     unmerciful –

            white power                tearing

                       at its own skin               the itch

                                    of not belonging.


Influenced by David Goldblatt’s photographs in his published photo essay ‘In Boksburg,’ which includes extracts from the relevant

South African Group Areas Act of 1961; and the exhibition ‘Dreamhome’ AGNSW, August 2023.