GRACE UNDER PRESSURE
BOOK I: THE NAME
Sing, Muse, and you, imbongi of my people,
whose praises rolled like thunder down the valleys.
Sing of a man whose name walked in ahead of him,
a word the elders folded round his shoulders
the way you fold a blanket for a long, cold road.
Lubabalo. Grace.
Not the grace of ballrooms or of easy weather,
but the older kind, the kind that holds
when every rafter of the roof is groaning.
Hemingway gave it a plainer name.
Churchill wore it like a bowler hat through war.
Say it slowly. Robert Langdon would kneel to it
and turn its syllables like the rings of a cryptex:
Lu-ba-ba-lo, four stones in the lock.
Behind them lies no map and no Grail,
only a promise older than both:
you were named for mercy before you needed mercy,
and mercy, it turns out, was going to be needed.
BOOK II: THE HARVEST
Hesiod, farmer-poet, knew this story.
His brother Perses came with honeyed words
to claim a share of fields he never ploughed,
and three thousand years the furrow still runs true:
some kin arrive at harvest, never at the sowing.
So it was with you.
You rose before the roosters.
You ploughed the dark with lamp-oil and stubbornness,
and kept the long arithmetic of hope
while no one asked how the seedlings fared.
Where were they in the ploughing season?
Silent, or worse, the doubt that dresses up as concern:
Why this? Why that? And when will it pay?
Then came the first green shoots, and suddenly
the phones grew warm, the voices soft as butter,
and open hands appeared, patient, practised,
counting your grain before it had been threshed.
The wound was never the asking.
The wound was learning that for some
love is an invoice,
and family can be a verb that means to collect.
And you loved them anyway.
That was the heavy part.
Loving them anyway is a hundredweight of stone.
BOOK III: THE DESCENT
Every epic owns an underworld.
Odysseus went down with a trench of blood and a sword.
Aeneas went with a golden bough and a Sibyl's hand.
You had no bough, no Sibyl, no map.
You had a room, a ceiling, and a fog.
It had no monster's face, this dark.
It came as grey, as the sun turned into rumour,
as the simplest tasks becoming boulders,
and you a Sisyphus in borrowed slippers
who watched the hillside and the hill said no.
Messages lay face-down on the table.
The days lost their edges and ran together like rivers.
Somewhere a voice said, Be strong. Be grateful.
As if the weight could be argued off a back.
As if the drowning man is meant to thank the water.
Yet listen, this is where the song turns.
Heroes are not made in the roaring.
They are made in the small hours, in the small deeds:
a glass of water. A window opened.
One breath, then one more, then one more.
No trumpets sounded, and it was still an epic.
It is always an epic when a person chooses morning.
BOOK IV: THE QUIET
You went to the quiet as the old ones went to the mountain,
for they knew what mountains are for.
It was never exile. It was a chosen hush,
the way a wound is kept clean and covered.
There was tea. There was the slow return of appetite.
There was your own company, at first a stranger,
then a tolerable guest, then something like a friend.
And at night you went out beneath the iinkwenkwezi,
the stars, those distant lamps the ancestors lit
so no child of the earth would walk in total dark.
You learned the light you see has travelled ages.
It left its fire long before you asked to see it,
and still it arrived.
Ah, you thought, then I too can be late
to my own healing and still arrive.
There you were small, and small was a mercy.
The universe did not need you to be strong.
It only asked that you be here,
one more spark inside the vast, unhurried dark,
held, as every star is held, by something greater
that does not charge for the holding.
BOOK V: THE COUNCIL OF FRIENDS
Now comes the turn no one expected.
When you looked up from the quiet, hands were there:
not the hands that reach to harvest,
but hands that came to set a table.
Some friends arrived like Mozzie in the doorway,
suspicious of the whole wide world (the banks, the sky, the government)
but loyal past all reason to you,
with a bottle, a scheme, a joke,
and the plain, unshakeable conviction
that a friend is the only con worth running for a lifetime.
They sat with you on the floor.
They did not count your grain.
They asked, How are you? and waited for the answer.
One quoted Churchill, badly, over tea.
Never give in! he said, and you laughed,
and the laugh cracked something loose inside your chest.
Umntu ngumntu ngabantu.
A person is a person through other people.
Our elders had it right,
and blood, you learned, is only a fact,
while family is a practice, a daily doing,
a table with no head, like Arthur's,
where every seat is round and every voice is level.
So the ledger was rewritten:
those who gave nothing at the ploughing
sat on one page, and on the other
a fellowship who asked for nothing
and offered everything.
BOOK VI: THE MIRROR
Narcissus loved his face and drowned.
You were asked for something harder,
to look into the water and simply see,
to meet the eyes of the one who ploughed the dark
and say: I know what you carried. Well done.
You learned that a gate is not a wall.
A gate is grace with good hinges,
and it opens for the ones you choose.
You could forgive the hand that grabbed
and still keep the latch down.
Forgiveness is a gift to yourself.
It is not a licence for the thief.
You spoke to Qamata in the morning hush.
You called the amadlozi, the watching ones,
and they answered as they always do,
not in thunder but in the settling of the chest,
the sense of a hand at the small of the back,
a yes from underneath the earth.
And you learned the last, quietest secret:
grace was never only the thing you were given.
It is a verb, and you may aim it inward.
It is the mercy you extend to your own weary self,
the way you'd welcome a traveller at midnight:
Come in. Sit. You have walked far enough.
BOOK VII: THE HOMECOMING
Odysseus returned to Ithaca a stranger.
The house was not the house he'd left,
and he was not the man who left it.
So too with you.
You have come home to a house that is yourself,
with the roof mended and the windows open
and the fire burning steady in the hearth.
The harvest is yours now.
If you share it, it is by your own choosing,
a gift and never a levy,
handed over with an open palm
and a gate that swings on its own good hinges.
So hear it, as the imbongi would proclaim it,
down the valley, up the mountain, to the stars:
Son of the morning cold,
ploughman of the midnight furrow,
walker through the fog who kept on walking,
keeper of the quiet lamp,
brother at the table with no head,
friend of the sceptical and the loyal,
child of the ancestors, kin of the stars:
Lubabalo.
You were named for grace,
and you have earned the name the long way:
not by never breaking,
but by breaking, and being mended, and rising anyway.
Grace under pressure, yes.
And grace under stars.
And grace, at last, at home inside your own skin.
Ndiyabulela. I give thanks.
Camagu. So let it be blessed.
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