I remember that time I held my mother’s hand

led her across the parkland temporarily blinded,

her infected conjunctiva spindly red;

burst open veins squirrelled about her white

opal hemisphere or sclera, her iris brown green

with a lint of gold, or hazel bewitchment.

Scared of leading her all the way to the doctor

only six years old, or thereabouts, past the play equipment

where the cross-dressed bearded man sat

drinking methylated spirits, rocking her pram

with a white poodle in it, across the busy road,

past the veterinary clinic. My mother’s

cyclopean tortoiseshells impressed me,

those oversized glasses she wore protected her

from the suns glare and gave me hope –

to go beyond the narrow confines of suburbia,

the peerless dull brick veneer houses, not as

Howard Arkley depicted, no neon splashes of colour,

or floral embellishments, only uniformity,

boxed gardens, concrete drives, fenceless plots.

My mother loved to dress up, to present herself

to the world everyday as if she were dressing for paradise.

Her expensive French silk scarves, gangster-like

gold ropes around her neck, diamond rings, fur coats.

Her mother dressed up too, sewed her own clothes,

put elegant outfits together. Perhaps,

in the spirit of Frida Kahlo who awoke everyday

to dress with such festivity, mythopoeic flair, so as

to face the divine with her chin up despite persistent pain.

My mother’s pain is like a temporary blindness,

it comes over her, she retreats into herself, goes

searching within herself for her-self-lost. This morning

I woke up with my lids stuck together, lashes-laced,

encrusted with gound from infection. From time to time

I go blind. But, I have one weapon against the dark,

a cutlass with which to sharpen myself, I wake every day

bare-skinned as a Phoebe and I dress for paradise.