The Summer We Didn't Die

By Christine Coates

The Summer We Didn t Die is Christine Coates third poetry collection. It is an assured, tender collection that offers the reader a way to think about the mysteries at the heart of what it means to be human, in this place and time.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Modjaji Books
• Release date: Oct 8, 2021
• ISBN: 9781928433347

Christine Coates

Christine Coates, a poet and writer from Cape Town, holds an MA in Creative Writing from the University of Cape Town. She has had two collections of poetry published, Homegrown (Modjaji Books, 2014) and Fire Drought Water (Damselfly Press, 2018). Her debut collection Homegrown received an honourable mention from the Glenna Luschei Prize. Her poems and fiction have been published in many local and international literary journals and have been widely anthologised.

Book preview

1. The summer of ’69

Learning to drive

I steer down my mind’s road

not knowing how to brake,

I dead-eye the destination

I cannot reach.

I wear my grandmother’s bones,

like cutlery, cruise past a photograph –

an infant in a wicker chair

chews the end of a loaf.

I’m on a joyride, round and round

the moon. Mother’s hair is feathers.

I wish I could stay like this

forever, never arriving.

There are gifts in everything

that hurts us. Oupa wears

his face behind his eyes,

shadow puppets on a screen.

I swerve past a rock fall,

my father is all over the road.

I gather his pieces,

put them in a basket.

We stopped saying his name –

that’s how one disappears.

The summer of ’69

That summer we didn’t die

we cycled out of town into the country,

we braaied sausages by a stream,

walked across the narrow culvert.

The river dropped away, a hundred feet below

but I know how memory shrinks and expands.

That summer we didn’t die

we went to the beach all day, our bodies

tingling from sea and sun.

A bluebottle stung me and you took me

to the dunes and peed on my leg –

it was the most natural thing to do.

Later you made us all dinner, and when

the others were sleeping and my mother passed out

from too much wine, we sat on the bed,

your hand up my shortie pyjama top, a whisper of

a touch, then an eager puppy pulling at my nipple.

Is this very bad, I asked, that summer we didn’t die.

It was the summer my father died,

my sisters ran feral like baboons when the leader is killed,

but we didn’t die that summer –

we danced to Dickie Loader and The Blue Jeans,

we French kissed and

your hand progressed to inside my panties.

That winter we listened to the moon landing;

leaving Klerksdorp was a greater challenge.

The sixties were ending – you left for a job in Joburg,

called to say you’d bought a red Alfa Spider.

I never saw it; you’d written it off without scars to show.

I met a boy with a blue Capri and another with an old green Morris;

the next summer I was riding with boys in cars.

But that summer we didn’t die.

Summer storms

The white noise lulls me,

thunder lifts my ear,

wind sweeps the topsoil,

fills the town with dust –

not the dust devils we’re used to

but windstorms –

from Wepenaar to Wolmaransstad

it settles in our lungs.

Oupa says decades, a lifetime of soil.

Whose lifetime I ask –

his seventy-six years or my scant seven.

Our world is blown away,

only grey scrub bossies

cling to the earth.

Western Transvaal farm visit

Tractors, tools, tyres, body parts, hubcaps,

Oldsmobiles, Fords, Chevys,

roosters crow in the heat, flies.

Clumps of blue gums, cement dam,

boys go round and round,

we swim the whirlpool.

Ouma’s rusks and thick sliced

bread, appelkooskonfyt.

Jannie’s cut his finger, it drips

as I take my first bite of the bread,

red on