Ode to poetess Ingrid Jonker

The sea sets free, a womb decree (Ingrid Jonker) You never knew defeat yet poems and images surged through your torrid landscape like swallows in the fall. Shallow graves and swirling waves clothed your weeping frame, the celestial dreamer, the perennial weeper unmasked in the blanket of national cancer, in the casket of a funeral dancer. Father figures and Indian givers severed your heather that grew boundless but failed to deliver. Dangled like a marionette, played like a castanet your life passed too swiftly, your spaces too misty, Ingrid the healer, Ingrid the seer lifted and sifted by the dragon dealer, your lot was caste in the raging tempo of an African storm where raindrops splash their words like a thousand poets surge and then to wash the courtrooms of the world where dreamers hunger to unfurl. Shiloh Noone