FERIAL MOHAMED 
Busyness is a ghost school. Hurt disappears in
traffic but does not vanish. And then a thread
swoops through the metal eye. A still moment
of missing truth becomes an eagle carrying a
canary back to its end.
Ms Morris’s comments found in an old
stack of reports from primary school—
the future, a sock inside the past.
She must work harder on her Maths.
She is too shy.
She must make friends in class.
Her English is excellent.
You knock a “for sale” sign against the fence of the
house you grew up in. A wall as constant as an
alphabet becomes invisible in a whistling kettle’s mist,
never to be held again. A gutted fish asks to drown
once more—asks for an inch of misery back.
A strip bar on Thursday at lunch time,
a lone patron blue as a bruise. A woman in a cage dances
like he isn’t even there. He drinks his bottle empty.
The strapless laughter of the grandchildren you never met.
Your hair and your eyes and yesterdays’ longing play, ring
a rosie around the tree you planted when it was your garden.
Staring out across three deserted deck chairs, an empty pool
at Motel Nine, listening hard to the song we loved before
you left to marry someone else.
FERIAL MOHAMED
is an attorney with a Masters in Creative Writing from the University of Cape Town. Her debut novel is currently being published. Her poetry has been selected for publication in the 2020 edition of the Ake Review, the official journal for the Ake Festival taking place in Lagos. A selected poem is also being published as part of an anthology by New York based publisher, Train Publishing.
In 2018, three of her poems were published on the Avbob website as part of the Avbob poetry competition.
