milner place | dark wings

Dark wings

She thought this is my lucky day, when the baas
didn’t beat her when she spilled the coffee, when
he didn’t squeeze her young breasts and take her
like a sweating bull when the missie went shopping;

when she wasn’t locked in the shed with no windows
for having forgotten to polish the horns of the kudu,
whose sad head hung over the mantlepiece gazing
at the twin tusks and assegais on the facing wall;

when they said she could go home for a night, even
to leave in the gold and pinks of the sunset, to walk
the dusty road through the wattle plantations, farms
where birds fluttered and dipped over the green corn.

The judge asked if she had anything to say. She said:
I saw the black widow-birds dancing in the mealie fields.

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