For Keorapetse Kgositsile, on the occasion of his 70th Birthday

You are everybody's child:
you stand at the intersection
of will and destiny.
There is enough of you
for everybody who wants.

You are a photograph,
an album of possibilities,
looped like a memory,
always beginning.

A small boy shakes a mossy tree
laden with ripe red apples;
as birds throw
scraps of sweetness
through the air, and bees
bend their knees to pray to the
flower god,
and streets lay their feet in the
bucket of the day,
and aching dust floats off them,
and the day sighs and its jazz,
you are the deep blue night, die verlore nag,
torn away from the stars,
saxophones run down the railway tracks,
playing catch with your fears;
pennywhistle cupids shoot hearts
with melodic arrows, and honesty
can't sleep while injustice creeps along
slimy tunnels, looking for outlets;
and the boy under the bearded tree
thoughtfully collects this careless, leaping life,
his century, his day, his apples,
harvested in
the belly of his red, red shirt:

time flows downstream
and life swims hard against the flow,
grace jumps into the water,
grace revels in struggle and sunshine,
grace tells you that it is playing;
grace is growing.