Temporary Traffic Lights on Banbury Road

The waves are parted,
Not by a prophet, but a simple switch.
The brutish tide shrinks back,
To tremulous walls of sound, and eyes.

A course abandoned.
Not to the writhing of fish but to the spring,
Which flies unnaturally sweet,
And larks in dusty spirals on the negated road.

Claimed, not reclaimed, for a blackbird’s song.
Annexed by morning
From the silent blackened province of the night
A Spring moment, just long enough to perceive

Then the tiny massless motion breaks the dam,
And juddering, the flow resumes.
Conscious of its presence
It pulses automatic and poisonously slow.

- A lullaby for the Parktown babies

March 2001