Sleep blues & Going through my father’s things

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Sleep blues
As I was sitting here
the roof fell in, a cat
jumped out of me
and I found myself looking
at the world from outside me.
Midnight does this, too,
when emptiness
hangs from the sky. I stare
at a god whose headlamp
leans in to study me.
The far cry of misery comes
from another street
to tell me the health
of someone has found
death. I try to leap back
into my body before dawn.

Going through my father’s things

The documents my father left rustle inside the drawers
of his study, seeking prominence. I’ve come home
from Europe to help my mother sort this once and for all,
newspaper cuttings, one of which I sent to a Cape Town poet
who would know what thought had made my father keep it,
after we had classified everything; leaflets scattered
in drawers, and letters, letters of a plea to the world
to give his children scholarships, deep love letters
when he was courting my mother, before they left Morija
and went to Maseru. She says when she called me for help
these had started rattling the desk like a poltergeist,
and once, she recollects, she could smell smoke
coming from that room. Some of the papers were dusty.
But when we were done with it the room was tidy,
my father’s thoughts in hard-back files on several shelves,
like the books he was going to write. Overwhelming,
to sit here among his things, and pull a writing pad
forward, and find you have absolutely nothing to say
to the world. I pick the copy of a Reformed Church
Nicene Creed he once copied in longhand, and framed,
and remain in that dark room, seeking his meaning.