Coffee calms me like the voice of my Mother seeking me among a crowd,
and she is nice and alarmed, calling me by both names she gave me, soft
as when she did the first time. And she is dark, too, my mother, standing
above the kitchen sink in sheepskin slippers, sipping rooibos tea.

The atmosphere outside is gathering like someone assembling a brow
into a frown. Not out of anger but out of the knowledge of what is inevitable.
The first, few flakes of sleet are on the way; the house is beginning to chill,
to ready its post-mortem; the dog was turbulent last night, whimpering

in its kennel and crying like a deserted child. They say yesterday’s errors
make tomorrow a new day. They say what was built on terror will still end
in grief, until the sky opens its arms like a mother when a child gets home.
I don’t feel the life of my body anymore. I watch my mother’s sipping tea.

The afternoon clouds hanging above look like the hoary hair of ancestors
with their lifetimes turned upside down, their bitterest rain yet about to pour.

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Khotsofalang and mom in Qoaling, late 70s