In 2007-2010 I made three service trips to the Eastern Cape of South Africa, the subject of an essay titled And the Lame Shall Walk published in the Michigan Quarterly Review. I’d finished the first draft of My City of Dreams and was trying to write something new. I struggled with long-format prose and thought maybe poetry would be easier. It was not!
I took a poetry class and one assignment was to use technical language in a poem. So I used the description of the appearance of an overwhelming infection of the brain as viewed under the microscope. I tried to describe my despair over watching an HIV infected woman with likely cryptococcal meningitis, pregnant with twins, dying alone in the Isolation Room of the maternity ward at Dora Nginza (promounced Door-an Gin-za), a former black-only hospital in Port Elizabeth. Xhosa is a local tribe and instead of pronouncing the X you make a clucking noise.
The Isolation Room
Dora Nginza
Wife of a Zulu chief
Her namesake sprawls.
Hallways clog with steady hearts
Beat on folded sheets of rainbow—
Listen!
Xhosa Sisters!
Outside
Goliath herons mount the bloom of coral trees.
Inside
Brothers!
Inside, under dusty glass
Gentian rushes dura, arachnoid
Fuchsin strains the faux to pinch us with a cross-eyed stare.
Blind sons, tethered, float in mercury vessels.
White coats tip-toe, sleep rumpled, into pia
And drip through yielding dendrites
Knock!
Daughter!
Awake!
Yet still so dreamily demising.
[Image: On the beach in Hamburg, South Africa with a young friend circa 2008]