Thanks to Wasafiri magazine for publishing Knock On Wood in Volume 36 Issue 3. Check out the published version here. The latest version of the poem is below.
Knock On Wood
Awake early, for a change, I shake my husband to tell him my dream; my dead dad had said,
we need a place to rest and chat in the garden. 8 bricks, 2 wood-planks later — tahdah!
A bench knocked-up from bits of Mum’s hurricaned house. The fence repairs to keep the
neighbour’s male, kale-addicted goat out would have to wait. We made the seat together.
To sit in heat and breathe humid air. A new health ritual to join the herbal teas and exercise.
We decide on basic rules. No virus or apocalyptic talk. There is enough fact and theoretic noise
around these topics already. No human sound at all is fine. Together 28 years we know to listen
for when one of us wants to be, comfortably, or uncomfortably, silent. We’re alert to nature’s
quiet too; ears fine-tuned for warning changes in environmental chatter. He slowly grinds
some home-grown, self-roasted, coffee beans and I grin to myself, knowing how this goes.
He will 10-minute-time the gas-stove pot for its drawn-out brew, and I will stretch an extra
10 for richer flavour. We take our mugs out. Mine hand-painted, rim-chipped but treasured;
his, plain cream and logo-stamped from Starbucks. We walk barefoot through damp grass
and I try not to trample the tiny mushrooms I notice for the first time. I wonder if that fungi
film I watched last night on YouTube, brought them into view. I tell my husband how minute
mycelium, intricate under-our-feet fibers, communicate; sole connects us to under-ground
worlds. How they, are our ancestors. He skeptically smiles. He turns to show me the trees,
miraculously thriving still since the hurricane; the thick row of sugarcane; the hollow where
the mango had been ready to gift us its first fruit; the steady hum of bees bee-ing all over
the little lime and large moringa blossoms — an awesome sight and sound as we feared
they would not return. Yesterday, my husband chopped off rotten cherry tree branches,
after one fell heavy, bang on his head. We laugh about this precarious life we’ve survived
thus far; each scared and sacred point, leading to this conversation, over this coffee, on this
bench, in this garden, in this country, in these times, after that storm. Entrenched in challenges,
we try to imagine what normal could possibly look like. We rap knuckles on our wooden bench.
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