Five poems from Songs For Ibba

Departures

Ibba Girls School, Western Equatoria State

I heard one girl burst into tears
when she saw the showers;
and after she learned the class was full
another slept overnight in the hallway,
her father having trekked with her
three days across the land.
In the village, they saw staff from the school
astride bikes, precarious at first
before they became fluent.
Would walk on fourteen kilometres to Maridi
to man a one-mango market stall.
Now, departures are painful.
Billet-doux are passed between hands.
The girls embody salt
they carry back to their villages,
often returning marked, or muddied
at the commencement of each term.
They take their leave in formal English:
‘If you want to open this letter, open it with peace.’
‘I greet you in the name of our Lord Jesus.’
‘Esther Joseph Aquila sends her greetings.’

Aubade

They would soothe us in the mornings
with their sweeping. Outside our cabins
a moving view, shifting like antelope.
We watched as the girls progressed
across the whole school. They suggested
that, in time, we would move too:
a voice might stand upright, two then three
by the dust and piled bricks
where foundations had been laid;
a caravan carry bright yellow
buckets to the dormitories, a choir
assemble, clothes be lain on lawns
to dry in the hand of the breeze;
cleaners, strident in their uniform,
in their sun, might approach our rooms.
I could see almost to the gate,
the compound as it came awake.

Compound

Dusk

On Friday, the women dress up, sit together at a distance
and look back to the school.
Wheelbarrows, water tubs, chapatti over coals;
the kettle hot with kindled fire.
Dust stirs, armed guards sit under thatch and drink tea:
it begins to rain as men make mortar.
Under canopy, girls sew.

Sister

Jovia from Uganda is revered
for her beauty. A nurse,
she sweats with the fever
like anybody

lemons pressed
to marmalade, bottled
in her garden

administers Artemisia,
prescribes bucket showers,
squints in the bhundu
over the stools of the missing

before the tending
comes the scything
and slashing

A man with little sight
is discussing
the girls’ progress
over a potage of beans

though he is nearly blind
able men plunder vegetables
from his garden

Vigilance

One week away with the shakes,
I track the bird’s shadow across dust.
A teacher orbits the desks,
his chalk mined in a factory in Kampala.
Nocturnal hunters send antelope across
the boundary into the school.
Two shots –
the snoring guard snapped from his sleep
by the sprayed gunfire of toppling fruit.

Post

The cow slipped a gate
and because it was African
its horns went before it
(the charcoal is brought
to the brazier, glowing in a ladle,
as the guard recounts last night’s story);
bought for slaughter, it had thought
to slip the net under the horns
of a new moon;
a posse set out into the bhundu
all machete and rifle
to hunt her down.
Trying for a little touch
(to replace the herdsman’s hand)
it had scared the local children off
with its clumsy hazardings
at reaching out, received
a swipe before its face,
volleys of rocks, retired
to a scratching post at the far edge
of the compound.

*

So the girls behind the desks
burning in their uniforms.
Hearts seek hands seek hearts
as birdcalls pierce our sleep,

buckets slosh over the floor
and leaves spill from their banks.
The plane will come from the West
to take away their visitors.

*

And still they sweep (the ants
in the sugar work no harder)
this morning dressed in football strips,
raindrops exaggerated against tin.
The guards laugh and make off,
and the morning is more spacious
like creaking rivets at the evening’s
cool relief, grateful for the stretch;
the girls mark out their boundaries,
attempt to lay the unruly cookhouse dust,
as we await the arrival of chapatti
wrapped ten-deep inside the cloth.

Boundaries

They swoosh the grains from their paths, our paths
as they pass and re-pass; the school no less
dusty for their besoms and industry.
Though here it is customary to mark
the boundaries each morning, to beat
the earth to feel its beat back –
so when they stamp the floor for God
they know just what pressure to bear
to draw a spring to limb and lung,
to keep the channels clear.
And should their cattle slip the gate,
men with rifles will seek them out.
Should gunshot fill the evening air,
they know it does not originate here.
Curses as the generator fails.
Now some carry water on their heads,
two prop their weight against a pump
and these three crush millet with pestles.
We sit and watch, our coffee heated on a brazier:
a diligence intimate as knitting, each uniform
distinct with its high-stitched Christian name.