The two trees stand there in our minds, juxtaposed, meaning by inference. We experience, rather than articulate, the result. The juxtaposition results in a feeling: instantaneous, spontaneous, complex, multitonal, irreducible.

Hers was a city of winds and storms, of fierce sun and chilling fog, of long cold rains and terrible droughts, of unexpected hails and gales, and sometimes all those things in one day. A city of unease, Cape Town. A moody city. A place of rock and water. Rock and water. The mountain and the sea had long ago broken and brokered its shape, but history had pushed back at the natural rim of the coast and formed a place out of careful division.

4.2. Explore Possible Solutions

The future is not like the weather. It doesn’t just happen to us. We shape our future with the choices we make in the present, just as our present situation was shaped by choices we made in the past.

And there was wonder, too: he learned to see the wind by watching patches of ruffles on the water’s surface. To be on the sea at dawn, with the clouds blazing pink and gold, the sky all kinds of blue, the ocean reflecting everything above, as that ball of fire rose above the horizon, was like being inside a painting.

Poets are the last heretics of the world. We flung our country, our trodden, deeply divided land, open like a delightful carpet at our feet. The many colours shot out across the floor and a newborn land slipped from its membrane of languages. And it lay down. Our country lay down among us, translated into parables palpable with light.