FUTURE LOVE

FUTURE LOVE

When red dust and birds dance in warm skies
I could forget everything that you told me
Yet a single glance fills the months

With one word the weight of an entire night
Spontaneously, a grand portal unlocks
Releasing an eager summer morning
A flood of light upon a tremendous scene

Nature charges with this radiant language
Inviting me fast to this fertile moment
The sweet earth and her abundant loaves
Beckoning love’s chosen mate

Bees obsess over warm nectar
A breathing sanctuary waits vibrantly erect
The sticky atmosphere swells heavy with purpose,
Another hot day changes her mind

From the startle of unrestrained tears
Frenzied kisses darting at my sandy feet,
To the intoxicating steam rising softly with the salts

Is it this world or the underworld that trembles with me,
Pleasure exceeding pleasure itself
Oh my God, oh my God
This love

Ahh, yes
Some afternoons are made for these heavenly showers
To bathe in the knowledge of her sacred body
Drenched in the assurance
That I am made to love

All the dreams of yesterday are awakened like this
All the matters of the heart are revealed like this
All the disasters of tomorrow are rinsed away like this

Eroding away concrete’s persistence
Eroding away concrete’s plans

How the rapid cool babbles over pebbles and stones
How your omnipotent glory moves everything
How racing rivers swirl heavy into the seas
How they speak of your ungovernable force
How everything vibrates your name

And in this very same moment
Far but not so very far off from here
A monumental glacier blasts free
Piercing great bodies of heavy water
A reverberating Boom

Ice blood gushing through the rolling sea
Her magnificent currents sculpting new lands
Wild birds scatter upwards into the blue
Debris and shredded shorelines
A new season moans

Much further out still
Beyond these earthly scenes
The moon continues to manifest the earth’s heartbeats
A pulse that holds my story with me
The dreams of my receptive body
All of it is God’s music

A decision expands,
The extent of an immeasurable power
Faith, encoded in a seed

And inside my indigenous memory
I remember a fiery womb
A warm chamber of crackling sparks
My great grandmother’s glistening eyes
The reflection of my activated storms

As I move deeper into the arctic forest
In the kind of cold that ignites survival
And as night lays its icy ink on evergreens
A fierce wind carries my resistance songs

And no matter how dark the hour gets, I breathe
The only thing left for me to do is to accept this
Everything I believe in is reflected in my own eyes
There are no more ordinary reasons for making love.

Copyright © Nomzi Kumalo, 2024.

Editing

Life can get challenging sometimes, so when it does, find the light; in a poem, a song, a good conversation, a shared meal, rest, under a tree or by the sea.

I remember going through a painful period in my life that pushed me to write my first WordPress post about returning home to South Africa, essentially to myself. Some day I will tell you about how poetry chose me back then. For now I keep writing and editing my poetry book.

Over 1000 followers later, I am truly grateful for your support, guidance and inspiration 🌸

Copyright © Nomzi Kumalo, 2017.

Blue is the quietest colour

I can hardly breathe for the love
When light makes our skin so real
Scars and marks I won’t recognise
I have no want to join such details

Many tones of blue before dawn
The colouring of regret and hope
Blue ink drenched all the surfaces
To soften the stretch marks of life

Curling up into this our ordinary
I can now smell the quiet of you
Hearing that love can’t get closer
For love is sleeping outside of me

Your skin now glowing blue milk
I do forgive you, I do forgive you
I reach out to celebrate your body
Make you witness your choices.

Copyright © Nomzi Kumalo, 2014.

Originally posted 22 May 2014.

Summer break. Wishing you peace.

After Hell

Brought to my knees
Yet I am still calling out an Earthly name
Whose claims of love I never believed
Even when he stood in the fire with me

Because there is not enough desire
No not in this world
To drink disappointment away

Devastated that you are always thirsty
As God and death wait patiently
For me to leap into love once more

Without a single promise

What is my name.

Copyright © Nomzi Kumalo, 2015.

Pray for Spring

Warm gentle rays
Briefly unclench the concrete town
Winter draining into the swollen underearth
Whose bowels digest the dark of your discontent
But who am I to mistake your magnificence
Your cool air invigorating life’s purpose
Oh lift me up
Once more.

Copyright © Nomzi Kumalo, 2015.

Menstruation

Nights when I watch the hours turn
As shadows struggle with the moon’s cause
And just after the two longest minutes have passed
While my temple of love clings still to my heavy heart
I birth the loss of you and the ill you tried to burden me with
Because it is very human to be human
And pride comes before a fall.

Copyright © Nomzi Kumalo, 2014.

Night traveling

Pillows and sheets quietly left behind
When most others sleep soft unevenly
Now expanding into fleeting inventions
Spinal breathing into silent electric fields
Life beyond the weight of consequence
Escaping the battleground of the souls

Gatherings in the endless dream streams
Briefly united through the darkest hours
Beyond undiscovered universal systems
Where time becomes even more elastic
Making seconds and years and centuries
Movie shaking the living and the beyond

To belong to places that always existed
Nothing will appear intangible over there
Repeating visits retracing ourselves again
And finally waking up to our personalities
Faintly remembering language and duty
Locating the angles of another new day.

Copyright © Nomzi Kumalo, 2014.

Kitchen in my religion

Hands deep in the communal water
Love, the kitchen cupboards, dishes
Piled up again to live out my religion

My feet and my heart, compassion
How comforting the steaming kettle
Whistling my life pressures away

Naked before all of my confessions
I now wipe the table clear of dirt
Breathe hymns into the soft season.

Copyright © Nomzi Kumalo, 2014.