These streets, those streets

Last week I walked those streets. This week I'm walking these: I've stayed behind at home this morning waiting for it to empty itself of all but me, my coffee, my thoughts, the street sounds from below including right now, a grinder screeching in tin-roofed factory. 

Also my soothing cast-over view across Woodstock that I flick my eyeballs over and across: It's my daily terrain that ebbs and flows between my window-on-the-world and up Argyle Street until over Victoria main, before verticalling into sanitised Upper Woodstock. 

It's then a sedate but abridged walk over peak-time Nelson Mandela Boulevard and into compact and cling wrapped Walmer Esate, before a - rapid dash - over De Waal Drive. Now, at last, I leave the city behind as I'm on to The Mountain and to stop only once safely in the neat dove-gray line of the cloud bank hiding, completely, the granite table. Only now will I truly relax; it is here that I seek to lie in peace, uninterrupted and unnoticed with my head on His lap.  

Last week the coral trees in bloom; an Eastern Cape spring; the old outpost's buildings; students and teachers in a time warp; tiredness behind my eyes; the poverty of desperate people on the High Street that I've never been able to reconcile myself with, the blood of the history of my country flowing in their veins and arteries: the lottery of my life versus theirs: fingers, nails, hair, shit, snot, piss, blood, cum. Ash and dust. 

It seems like there is nothing left to steal: where's the hope?

(A little boy plays with a puppy beneath the blooming coral tree that's made more glorious by the last sunlight before the storm.)