Silence is extinct
The summer wind is here
There is a fallen stop sign at the end of the road. Flat on its face, lying pointing at zero degrees North. The wind, southerly, shook its steel roots loose from the black tar.
Silence is extinct.
The wind has arrived.
The wind the wind the wind.
The wind has arrived.
Thought stops.
Seven days and counting.
If there is a border separating orderly civilisation and wild nature, it lives on the tip of the wind’s nose. It passed through here yesterday and yesterday and yesterday.
Or, if there is a border, the border is an eyelash, a membrane, a cheek on a body.
Or there is no border, except that we wish there was: we are human and kind and civil. We are human and the wind makes us unkind. The wind is not civil.
Way above, the ageless sky does nothing. It sits blue and immovable, blue and brilliant – the blue face behind the bluster.
The bird inside the body cage cannot calm.
Peace is extinct. There is a blunderbuss pointed at the face of the city.
The hinges of the fanlight are hanging on by screws loosened by the wind. The fanlight is closed but it bangs. At night, you no longer breathe through your breathing apparatus. Breath, instead, hiccups in and out of your ears. You chest hears. Your pelvis flinches. The aural horizon has shrunk and lives now in the troposphere of each individual human body – inside-outside-inside-out. There is no sound but sound. There is no sound but vibration. There is no vibration that is not churning internally-externally everywhere.
Gusts.
Gusts shake the city’s rhizomes, and the bones beneath the rhizomes. A dirty dust billows and cloaks, billows and cloaks. Ceiling boards suck in their stomachs. Bricks creak. Somewhere a clasp has sprung loose: bang baba-bang bang bang ba-bang.
Unbreakable things break. Unbendable things bend. Bendable things are breaking.
Trees are running away away away, but they’ve been running so long, they are bent to the ground because their legs can’t go. Their branches hanker away away away.
The wind pulls and kicks like a child in a mood.
‘Mannetjies wind’, some say of this wind: a little man wind; a small wind that is male. Why the diminutive?
The wind blows dresses up over women’s heads.
‘Up, up and away in my beautiful balloon.’
If only. If only.
Up, up and away.
Restless angry irascible.
Is the wind.
Restless angry irascible.
Welcome
Hello new Subscribers to Love Letter! You are in sweet company. The readers here are lovely.
LOVE Reading Club
The next LOVE Reading Club meeting happens on Saturday, 6 December at 3pm.
Anyone can read this month’s essay, which is called A Death and Life Experience. It is written by Khadija Patel. It appeared in Our Ghosts Were Once People, edited by Bongani Kona and published in 2021 by Jonathan Ball Publishers.
Love Reading Club is open to all paid subscribers of Love Letter. Please let me know if you intend coming to our in-person meeting.
January Reset
In January every year I ‘reset’. For the past three years, founding subscribers have been joining me in my daily half-hour sessions to take stock and to refocus on the year ahead. If you’re curious, please send me a message or leave a comment, and I’ll send you information.
If you’ve been meaning to upgrade to founding membership so that you can take part in January Reset 2026, now’s the time to do that. The button below will take you directly to the page where you can upgrade to become a founding subscriber.
With love,
as always,
K.
You describe this damn wind perfectly… I’m completely turned inside out by its malicious insistence to blow and blow and blow 😅😫
O!This is BRILLIANT Karin. Yessssssss!Your wording This. Yhooo! Thank you. Been watching waiting for the taller wilde dagga to capitulate and meet the ground...Nope. Not yet. Just bendy...