Sunday in East London
BY NATHALIE SCHMID, TR. ELLENE GLENN MOORE
Helicopter blades the whole afternoon
over East London even in the drone of the small pipe organ
proclaiming the call to ice cream. Pigeons flutter over brick walls
and rose bushes now old and without fragrance. A man
stumbles against parked cars with a last beer
in hand before his awareness drifts over to the roses he takes
another piss and pulls up his track pants.
He smiles at me benevolently. I’ve bought flowers
peonies whose heads are slowly unclenching
from a flower seller on Columbia Road with eyelashes
like silver parentheses Darling she said while
talking with another woman about the terrorist attack
from only nine hours earlier and about the tingling
in her legs. That was Sunday morning at the flower market in June
everywhere peonies the most delicate colors
only five pounds a bunch people carrying them along
in their bags but I am thinking of the heron back home
who stands at the field’s edge and never moves
as though he has always stood there gazing in all directions
quiet and utterly untouched. In the tree at the front of my house
flutters a blackbird who for days has been picking
at a kind of berry I don’t recognize whose name Sylvia
would surely know and now I think of all the friends
who no longer pick up. Just before dark
women in saris step out into the road and young men
in white garments open their doors a crack’s width for
friends with cigarettes and hastily parked bikes.
In the road one young man hurries. Even now he wants
to kiss the girl to whisper sweetly in her ear beside
rose bushes that are old and wild and still fragrant.
