Breakfast

As happy chance congealed to fate
So deftly Filip flipped my heart
Like the eggs we fried
At the breakfast end
Of that night we spent
On a makeshift bed
in a world punctured by Bush’s hate.

100,000 already died,
Fallujah waits for the murder to start;
but in that London flat
I felt my heart sssslide
onto his plate
when we whispered in the street-lit dark
lips inches apart,
his beard damp:
“Shukran.”; “Afwan.”
- a naked instant rejecting hate

And then again when tender humour crackled like the fat in a pan:
“This sweet work that we toiled at
till our hearts hammered
is it labour?
Is it alienated?
And who will present the paper?”

at 4am we dozed
4:30am, rose;
breakfasted, fuzzy-eyed.
And thus nourished and fortified,
- my heart a yolk, glossy and warm -
we set out in the dawn
to our ends of the world
he to Warsaw
I Johannesburg

From these far corners of a now restive earth
We'd shared the fight for a world’s rebirth
For years before we met
And meshed and loved and breakfasted
And left

July 2004