seasons (unfinished)

1.
Seasons are a slow sunset,
the integral of five, sixty,
three hundred twirls of the earth.
They are the practised artistry of the sun,
washes of light, heat
and their absence. A thousand layers
cast across ground stone, saturating
a thousand miles of Kalahari.
In my short life, never
have I seen such a pure canvas
as those thousand miles -
the dry scrub, the bleached thorns
the endless shades of sand.
They are scattered
thin and gasping
across the flatness of the land,
thirsty for the paintbrush of autumn rain.

2.
It falls. The thorns fade.
Edges slur and silver
and colour spreads like a virus,
laddering swiftly across the sand.

3.
I notice the small leaves
falling from the acacias.
Their quiet accumulation,
their congregation
with the dust. I notice
brittleness in the old thorns,
the spare grey bones of trees.
I notice cages, claws, empty ribs
shapes elucidated
by winter's desiccating grasp.

4.
The wind is blowing.
It scours, scraping clean the stones
sweeping ahead of it
the shivering corpses of mosquitoes.

5.
When summer storms in, she commands.
Electrical storms scorch the veldt.
No rain falls.
Her heat is a confrontation,
a steady aggression, a war of attrition -
each living thing wilts in turn.

6.
The days overflow with sun
hours heavy with the pressure of light
as the clouds sublimate and disappear.
Photons spear every shadow
invading retinas, skin cells,
ovenlike houses
burning past closed eyelids
and t-shirts, sandal straps and leather hats,
inescapable. It comes from everywhere:
the flecked pale sand, car windows
as they drive past white buildings,
tires melting on smouldering asphalt
but most of all the sky,
bone-blue and hard as a rock.