Mountain at Night

for Lineo, 'Masekoja and 'Makananelo

After swallowing me my mother emptied
me, along tracks of ancestral feet she had me.
Thaba-Bosiu, the mountain at night. We needed
your plateau at the top to help us crush skulls
into chalk with stone and brick, for the king
had made his village there, and growing at night
made passes steep to keep foes out.
When my cradle rocked the clay floor
of my mother's hut, nobody was allowed near
if I wasn't asleep. I think my parents
held their breath when approaching me,
ears against my lilac mouth
to hear my lungs, till I heaved and let go,
and shivered down as they traipsed into their room
to get on with what adults do on a winter’s night—
they needed to feel each other down like teens
in the dark. I remember, or think I do,
my parents heaving in that room,
getting each other off. When I was older I met a girl
who, like my mother, couldn't stomach lumps;
we'd lie there Kegeling, clinging like spoons,
three if you counted the child whose life
at the turn of the millennium when gods gave gifts,
was about to enter a world my wife and I
had spread in the season for the sun to dry.