MY HOUSE SITS ON THE HILL

MY HOSE SITS ON THE HILL My house sits on the hill overlooking the famous Cliffe cemetery. A wonderful place of rest, resplendent in reflected glory, where obelisks point high to a hopeful God and the bones of merchants lay in tombs fit for Caesar. Where undergrowth spreads gothically in the unexplored parts. Vast expanses of bramble bushes arched over like cathedrals providing the perfect hiding places for insects, spiders, small animals and dope dealers, like the underworld spreading through this city of intolerance and separation, of fear and suspicion, of words that should not be spoken, of issues that cannot be raised for fear of that midnight knock, of segmented ghost towns which lie cheek by jowl with the net curtain clipped accents, of gypsies and thieves, of long gone Germans and Irish men who rolled up their sleeves and dug the canals, those flat, straight works of art, of Asian nightshift workers who toiled on dangerous machines, of penniless Ugandans who dragged themselves up by their bootstraps, of fading trolley lines and fumed up bottlenecks, of sixties white elephants and exotic back alleys. This city has it all. It’s where they burnt the book against the words of the Prophet where cappuccino drinkers admire Hockney, where Charlotte and Emily penned their rugged books on moors that look down from their parallel world. This city where I continue my search. Why here? For what reason? For one, it was here that the ghosts would depart from me. (from my book Svera Jang)