Kellas #2 / The windmill house

Kellas #2 / The windmill house

"Little girl," she bends down, the new teacher
when I faint in the playground,
third time in a week.
"What do you eat?"

The licorice I devoured in the tuck-shop
lies at my feet
mixed with cornflakes with orangejuice.
"Little girl what do you eat?"

"Keep your stories realistic," she tells me, quite kindly,
"No one has windmills in their back yard!"
– I don't tell her we do,
 that it clangs in the night in the wind

beating its sails to the sky
drawing and drawing and drawing its water
up to the tank with its holes from the rust that we wait for,
my brother and I –

rust that we welcome because a new tank
means riding the old one as fast as we can
on the reeling old monster, our feet running backwards
as we shout like wild cowboys

all the way down the hill
in the wasteland that's ours,
rust cutting our fingers and toes
Nothing stops us,

except the tall veld, lion-gold in the sunlight.
No one has windmills in their back yard.

And we slide down its fireman's pole in the middle
to the mud in the overflow – river we call it –
that winds through the pines
down the side to the rockery.

Ten years later I'm sitting there
my wedding dress dusty, in the shade of those pines,
holding a home-made bouquet
its flowers picked from the garden that morning.

Nothing stopped us careening like wild things
beating our wings in the dark.