Jonty Driver poetry gig at "Off the Wall"

Jonty Driver was the featured poet for the evening and entertained us with some lovely poems.

Open mike was, as usual a mixed bag, in the best sense of the word, and after all it is is just a matter of opinion anyway. What appeals to one, doesn't to others, and so on.

A most enjoyable evening thanks to each and everyone's contribution, connection, and attendance.

See web album for some pics taken at the event:
Jonty Driver at Off the Wall

Swithin Fry

Edge

On the tight-rope,
holding hands,
taking turns to unhinge,
nearly toppling, nearly tumbling,
dancing along the line,
you in a tutu,
me in tights and boots,
you stop – pirouette –
I stop – sing an aria –
you climb onto my shoulders,
I hold your lovely ankles,
the wind gathers,
‘Do we care?’ we laugh and bawl at the get-together crowd,
you slither back down,
in the middle,
the very middle of a muddle,
we embrace,
yes,
in front of all those people who have come to find out what the excitement is all about
we kiss,
we snog,
DELIGHTFULLY…

and the crowd
loves us,
loves our daring,
loves our moonlit cunning,
loves our beads and bangles,
loves our feathers and frills,
loves our games and gaiety,
loves to smell fear for someone other than them,
BREATHTAKINGLY…

On the edge:
they watch;
we do.



Everyman

There, in the dark bastard shadows,
Everyman winked
and boasted of a time
when His earth-dirtied bones
wore flesh
(but it’s all lies, I say, all lies)

He pretends that those tears you see,
those He caused, those He wept,
pretends that they never were –
He smirked and laughed
in His cosy grave
(but they’re hollow laughs, I say, hollow laughs)

Only heroes, never villains
stalk the hills and valleys
of His shouted whisperings
about another time
(and place, I say, and place)

Once, to prove a point,
I shouldered a spade
heaved aside the stones
exhumed each and every
shook clear the worms
and superglued Him whole again!

(Now look, I said, now look,
who’d ya think you’re kidding, kid?
learn to stare the bad times
in the face, I said, in the face)

I palmed His jaw so close
I could smell
His last supper
but He replied nothing of Heaven nor Hell
so I sold Him to a Professor of Budding Thinkers
who interrogated Him
at length
(God knows he tried, I say, God knows he tried)
yet still He grinned of a life so grand
(that it must have been a lie, I say, it must have been a lie)

So, the Professor
trepanned His skull with a hook
and left Him dangling
(as a reminder, he said, as a reminder)

end


Prayer to the Raven Goddess, Zelphious

Zelphious, I pray, thou sprite of desert-winded winters, bottler of blue moons, puck whose spells sprout tusks on the tickly lips of dough-headed elephants, thou who shuns the done mirror, spells freeze the splash-crown of a drop with one whispered whoosh!, clicks crutches for the three-legged stallion, spit the wingless fly through his own bejewelled eye, poke the spoke-flattened frog with a whisk! to a croak, to thee I pray.

Breathe on me. Breathe in me.

Blind me with your billed spike, squeeze me through a tortoise shell, grease the wood-worm skin, let me kiss the vile toad to shun the pimpish prince, sharpen my teeth to bite the puckered fairy’s nose, weight my boots for stamping childers’ toes, give me a bucket of maggot-rot donkey dung to smear on mother’s best linen, arm me to splice the hobbled horse, brim my cup with oil, guide my feared hand to fire and blue touch paper yet frain retreat, to thee I pray.

And lo. Black-hooded, Zelphious rises.

Barbara and Jacques

Paul Mason - 9 April 2007

PAUL MASON FEATURED POET AT 'OFF THE WALL' 9 April 2007

For Eduard Burle, and for Silke Heiss

TWO LITTLE DICKIE BIRDS

A Wreath of Sixty-five roses*

Pale and thin,
White, delicate-veined
With bunched stalks –
They droop in the sun.
The diseased fruit of a mismarriage.
Or was it the season?
The climate? The ground
"Sixty-five roses, how quaint",
she murmurs,
"for an illness".

I draw into the shadows of a word
That has hung over me throughout my life,
Filtering and shaping the attitudes
Of those around me.
Unarticulated, it was a misfortune,
Articulated, it is a curse.
"Sixty-five roses",
she intones.
The distance between us is sufficient
For her benediction to become unintelligible,
A suitable epitaph.
(PJE)

*Sixty-five roses is a euphemism for cystic fibrosis, a degenerative lung disease.


A Common Calling (Extracts)

(For Peter Jonathan Esterhuysen, 20 June 1963 – 9 April 2004)

We scan photographs of him for the memorial service.
In these is the full smile,
the brown-eyed brimming zest of one
told as a child he would not live beyond 20.
At 40 he has gone now from us.
We enlarge the photographs. Doing so
says something about him: this:
he was larger than his own life,
larger than the limits of his body.
In being so he was
larger than life itself.
Life itself.
What is left behind?
What remains to remind us?
Us.

The us that bowed down together
to a common cause, a common calling:
words: their shaping.

We wrote poetry in separate cities.
Our words interwove,
fed into and out of and around
and through and over each other.
They visited, they called upon
each other.
They concocted a common exile,
took refuge in their own shadows.
They were beautiful in their doings together,
their me-in-him-ings, their him-in-me-ings,
their hymnings forth
of the common calling.

We made time for each other within
the ambits of our new worlds.
My eyes linger on a photograph
from one such time: we two on a bed,
as often we were, jesting, performing
our mock-erotic gestures,
our hugs and almost-kisses:
the reality of our affection.

There followed a time
things fell apart for me.
I got into a rusted car and drove
to the harbour of your home.
There we talked, ate liquorice toffees,
stayed up late, tuned our bodies
at the local gym, revisited our ennui.
We regained something of our child-days,
came to know of something,
an energy that lived inside of those days,
something that had moved us,
that we saw and knew in each other
when first we met, aged 20, half our lifetimes ago.
Something.

In a dream I sit in a lecture theatre.
The person at the rostrum announces
that someone is absent: you.
We await you, but the lecture must commence.
The air bristles with this knowledge
of your absence. Then, with a flourish,
you arrive. People in the back row
beckon to you. I call out your name
as you ascend the steps.
You return my call with a hasty smile.
And now the chase is on,
for you move at a pace like no other.
This is your nature, born from Marvell's truth:
"Always at my back I hear
Time's winged chariot hurrying near …"
You are pulled in several directions
by many at once. To have time
with you I must pursue, harry,
commandeer, hijack a slice of it.
Such labours breed
good health for the soul. For when
you are cornered, way-laid, settled down,
the pay-off resonates.
Something intense and rich surfaces,
a subtext of knowing
between one and the other.
Knowing.

I knew you. You knew me.
This will never not be.
It is,
though you aren't
with us any longer.

Still I dream, with comforting regularity,
of you. You reappear,
become manifest,
again and again and
again.
(PM)



It Is

It is the mezuzah on your door frame,
It is the rearview mirror in your stationary car,
It is the light reflected in your fanlight.

It is also the vision from the landlocked boat
Of the lit window behind which you stand, you
Who are unknown to me, on the twenty-fifth floor.

It is the mezuzah,
It is the rear-view mirror,
It is the light,
It is also the vision
Of the lit window
On the twenty-fifth floor.

Finally it is the distance between
The landlocked boat and the window
As the light goes out
And I watch you recline.
(PM)

It Isn't

It isn't the mezuzah on your door frame,
It isn't the spy-hole's vacant gaze,
It isn't the light-web in your fanlight
And it isn't your outline in a window on the twenty-fifth floor.
Lippitude settled in four beers ago, blotting out
Your window, the land-locked boat and the distance between:
But when your light dies do you stare briefly
At the street-singed fog below and wonder
If the same breath that clouds your rear-view
Disturbs the mezuzah when the room shudders?

Ah, it isn't the mezuzah,
It isn't the eye's spy,
It isn't the rear-view mirror,
Nor is it the vision
Of the unlit window
On the twenty-fifth floor
That draws me to your door.
(PJE)

I's Images

I rise from my desk and its books
and stand in the doorway
facing night's chill,
room's warmth behind me.

A score of headlights rounds
the vanishing-point of the land
as it skirts the sea.
I project my mind beyond the series of twin-lights
to the successive lives behind them.
I step back and muse at length,
on the negative power of multiplicity.

At a particular turn
each beam that's cast
cuts the sea's dark face
in a scar of light.

My mind weaves it moments in a flickering trace:
from each imagined life that imagines itself
to be free, to the distance between
them and me, to what I imagine myself to be.

I relinquish the looming chill of the night
for the adumbrated horizon of my room.
I am unable to resume my books,
my former resolve rendered desolate
by the image of all those others
who are each saying I, just like me

(that is, the me I imagine myself to be).
(PM)

A poem about myself

who am I?
unburied self I try
to conceal from
those who pry?
or the me I wear
from day to day
capricious mask
in pliant clay?
- everyone has a part
in designing my face
yet I seems such a private spot
for so public a place.
(PJE)



Poem

Heaving ungainly at tomorrow:
futile some say,
others say festive.
I wonder: what's in
the running to be gainsaid,
where the instruments
at our disposal with which
to glue our time to the backcloth
and make it, somehow, signify?

I harbour no hard-and-fast notions
in this or any other regard,
in this of all places. Just
to know of frail small sprouts
splitting the earth to don daylight:
both festive and futile,
unfurling.
(PM)

Welcome to this Poem

Welcome
to this poem
make yourself at home
would you care for something
refreshing, some light relief?
a cup of tea perhaps?
you must be exhausted reading
all those poems out there
and when one thinks of the unfigured
multitude (can you bear
the thought?) cross-breeding in bottom drawers …

it is a long, bitter winter's night and who dare
be an arbiter of taste in times like these?
and … oh the poet?
he's not in today
he's out selling life
the big companies pay
well, not forgetting the benefits,
and they love him
when he is angry.
(PJE)

The man in the poem

The man in the poem you wrote
Inclined his head, cleared his throat,
Bent to see the time – he said
Have the children been fed? He said
Are they ready for bed?

No children to feed, they've gone out to play,
They said there is going to be a carnival today.
The streets are barricaded, buses on fire,
They are piling the rubbish higher and higher
I said – I saw them building a funeral pyre.

We're living on the edge – he said – of a pirouette,
We'll all go spinning to our graves yet,
Will it ever wind down? I shook my head –
Only when all the fires have been fed – I said
Or when the turning hand has fled.
(PJE)

There

For George who procrastinated before going into exile.

To watch, to wait,
to wait again;
waiting confirms and
disturbs the face-splashed
surface as somewhere
the air breathes
and a leaf clatters
to the ground, disturbs
as a fly buzzes somewhere
and thumps dully against
the glass, confirms as the roof
cracks somewhere, as you move
to the window where a solitary
tree breaks the surface
without even moving, and as
the ripples wheel with widening arms,
breaks the eye's tensile film
as the ripples wheel and widen,
breaks the face's tensive watching
without even moving,
breaks the surface with

the weight
of waiting.
(PJE)

When in Brakpan

The Casbah in Brakpan
serves raspberry-red milkshakes
in vase-size glasses
just flash your lights
for service and don't hesitate
to move closer when the car in front
drives away and don't forget
the tray clasped to your window
when you drive away and it is
probably not wise to stare
at the khaki figures lined up
knocking back the shakes in
the casspirs at Casbah in Brakpan.
(PJE)
paren(theses)

(fuck-all matters anyway)
you greet the dusk you greet the day
(it all comes it all goes)
you pick the weed you pick the rose
(the sun will shine the sun will set)
you make hay you forget
(the moon will wax the moon will wane)
you live the joy you live the pain
(love will give love will refuse)
you win the game the game you lose
(the life will rise the life will fall)
you fly you crawl
(the point is there the point is gone)
you can't go on you go on
(the laurels of victory the thorns of defeat)
you excrete the shit the shit you eat
(the dusk that falls the break of day)
fuck-all matters anyway
(PM)


Blood in the Suburbs

That was the year of the bleeding sun
That parched the earth
And flayed the sky;
And old men threw bones
In their well-kept backyards,
Bent double in unconscious homage
Before the merciless African heat.

And the scorched grass shriveled;
And the flowers all died
In the suffocating embrace
Of what seemed to be a single afternoon.
While the algae-free garden ponds, stained
By the sun's reflection,
Implicated their ornate surroundings

And everything else reflected;
And yellow-bearded gnomes,
With cracked, concrete smiles,
Frowned in the white of their eyes,
Indignant, it would seem,
At the very thought of blood
Reaching the suburbs.
(PJE)

Now and Then

poetry is a lonely place:
a secluded courtyard with ferns
reaching out from earth-darkened stone
to blue-deepened moments of sky comes to mind,
but it is always only metaphor and dazed
wanderings across a starch-sterile landscape
where only type can block the nausea ,
give the lie to such artificial dreams
of not ever needing all those people now
who won't gather at my bedside then.
(PJE)


Hymn to Myself

I
return through the garden,
observe the silent rituals. Genuflect
at the bank of the stream, bend
to watch the reeds move, listen
to their rhythmic clatter in the breeze.

Rise and stretch, and move on, over
the footbridge and up the steps mossed-over,
to the terrace of green with
the pond at its centre. Then up
to the rice paper house, its transparency.
It is the only house, I know it well,
am its only occupant. Always the same,
all in its place …

On the contrary,
you have never lived in it:
to this it owes its … stasis.
But who has lived in it?
Who has seen to its perpetuity?
He has, that other one –
renouncing the garden and its rituals,
descending upon no knee, watching
no reeds, crossing
no footbridge, up
no mossed-over steps, across
no terrace with its pond, to
no rice paper house and its abstract occupancy.
A place that is nothing,
all-changing.

A blossom. Multifoleate. No, not even. Nothing.

Don't breathe a word of it, lest they know,
don't speak my name when I am gone.
Give me no quarter, brook me no consequences.
See me as death, treat me as such.
Be oblivious of me and kind to others:
renounce me. Certify me unspeakable to
be loved by all. Permit me no reed on
which to pluck my posthumous tune.
Never upturn the moss that entombs me.
Take me nowhere with you,
leave me still,
unchanging.
Renounce me.

Speak me.
Breathe my every word.
Inspire and expire me.
Be incessantly my Annunciation's angel.
See me ever-emerging, all-reaching.
Sanctify my word and breath.
Be my life and death.
Be me.
(PM)

Kechil Kirkham - May 14, 2007

Half Migration

Half the globe, the swallow flies
half asleep and half awake,
one upwing on,
one downwing off.
As I think of you,
one heartbeat on,
one heartbeat off.
When the swallow and I touchdown in England
seeking greenfields in May,
I will have
half thought of you,
half slept of you,
half waked of you.
And you, like a fly, will have
swallowed me whole.

Sharon Geffen - 2007

The Shout

How would Munch have brushed it
The floating howl of the mouth
The bared snarl of the hot foaming teeth
Scenting victory the head ducks and swerves
The shout pulsates and spears
Shards into the unsuspecting soul.
24 April 2006

***

My eyes do shine, my lips glow red
I look inside the mirror's eye
And peer in vain for who I was
And is it now too late to be?
Or do I glimpse a page, a pen
A poem cracking through the dry?
24 April 2006

***

The Phone Call

The voice purrs like a serpent into the instrument
Gliding tongue over honeyed words
I listen greedily, ears lapping
At the sounds never destined for me
25 April 2006

***

Muse

You are my muse
I turn to rhyme
To bend the cycle one more time

The scalpel turns
Incises heart
The freely bleeding fountains part

Aha a show
Colossus bold
To crush me down, "You're ugly, old

What happened to the girl I knew?
She's lying there
She's almost through

Her knees are smashed
Her skin is thin
Her neck is joining with her chin
Her belly bulges, birth bold scars
She cannot fight the younger stars

And what's the end this play of plays
As we go dancing through the days
Remembering our old repartee
Where I was you
And you weren't me
26 April 2006

***

Slut

Today you carpet burned my mind
"You slut!" you said, my heart turned red
As it lay gasping on the floor
Domestic heard, absorbed the word
Then listened for some more.

"You slut! You're dirt! Spots on my shirt!"
I cannot breathe with shame
"Not me, not me, I didn't see!"
The words hoarse up defensively
"Oh it's never your fault, you're never to blame.

Pass the buck to the maid who's black
What gives you the right
To be treated like a queen
Because your skin is white"

The heart once large
Freeze dried in pain
The tears they did not come
There is a void so stricken deep
An oozing bruise that's numb.

The burned look sore
Gaped red and raw
And still I cannot saw
"No more!

26 April 2006

***

Words

There is a torrent gushing down
Of letters hurtling past the rage
They smash, retract, boomerang back
Light motes with weight
They feint and weave; they strain and heave
Like stags for doe, antler tango
To stake their strike on page

I watch them spew, these words so new
These words long numbed in dormant age
The canter past the buckling pen
Stained pearl with sweat, they're gleaming wet
They pant, they foam, the finally float
And circle, waltzing past the cage
30 April 2006

***

Blame

You make me do it so he says
You make me flay your heart into a thousand shreds

I made him do it, it is true
I knew just how to carefully screw
The snare, the snarl, the hiss of teeth
The pounding foam of fury
From his voice and face
My actions matched his pace

And when it was all over
He'd soften down like putty
Relaxed and done he'd read the paper
And brightly ask for supper

And I lost thought on a desperate sea
Would ask is this all I'm meant to be
The fuel to catch his flame
The maker of the blame
April 2006

***

I know what it is like to be depressed
By a giant thumb
Spraining the nape of your being
Squeezing the shine from you eyes
Spreading you like scum across his sandwich
And screwing you in tight
So he has a secure night
29 may 2006

Kechil Kirkham most recently

Murder on the Mountain

I crushed the orchid that held the last droplet of my blood.
Stamped on by a left foot insistent on its right.
See how its petals now splattered with mud
lie like a dead man shot in the road
how its delicate leaves ooze green
through broken cell walls
its proud stem snapped
that entrancing fragrance, rare and sublime
hovering in the air like a filigree ghost.

That was the zenith of all creation
the most perfect orchid of all
with its velvet lark’s tongue
those tiny tiny spots of purple-brown
drawing the eye down its throat
of gorgeous regal vermillion.

It will never flower again, its head
arching fabulously over the ferns below
like a camp queen at a gay ball
teetering on platform shoes.
Gone with its Zen perfection
its orchid-ness.

Gone, and soon to follow the ferns that quivered below
and the grassy bank,
the pine trees, and before too long
even the mountain
will merge with the frothing, broiling sea
heaving with icebergs
melted by the sun.

That too will become dwarf, giant, supernova,
and beyond the time of days
will turn into something we have no name for yet.
Then, perhaps, can I be forgiven
and until that time have at least
something to look forward to.


Orchidectomy

My fingers brush the petals of the last orchid on earth,
feeling the narrow stalk, so breakable
trembling beneath my tips,
its head bowing softly like a servant.
I can almost hear it whisper,
pleading for clemency
lifting its head to bear its throat
of gorgeous, regal vermillion.
It gives up its fragrance to me with shameless grace,
a naked ballet dancer pirouetting for her life.

It does not know it is the last of its kind,
nor perceive the power I hold,
as my grip tightens around the fragile stem.

I could pluck this one,
wrench it right out of its socket of moss,
were it not for the green blood pushing through my veins
and the promise of so many tomorrows
hanging like a scented question mark in the air.

November 2006

Kechil Kirkham Featured August 28, 2006

The World Before Man

Since no-one was around to chart the progress of the sun
As it stoked its way across the heavens each day,
Following the ecliptic, obeying the
Grids of declination and ascension,
The meridian and azimuth firmly in their place,
I like to picture it taking a break on Sundays,
Jazzing across the sky
Or maybe picking up a little Cuban Salsa
Obeying the rhythms of a less military tune.

And the long grass in the Serengeti
Rather than swishing or swaying in the breeze
Deciding one day to suddenly lie down flat
Exposing all the animals taking a nap.

How lovely it would be
To witness a nameless tree silently fall in a far-off forest,
Suspended in mid-air as it gently lowers the birds in its branches to the ground.


Two poems about light

The Stars

One evening I looked up and saw
The stars arranged in grid formation.
If I lined myself up properly
I could see pin-points of squares in the sky.
Ah, I thought, the Administration has finally won.


The Sun

If there is one thing in the sky
It must be the sun.


The Christening of a Child

For the sin of being born of woman
he was exorcised.

Was I the only witness to this hate speech?
Why weren’t the South African constitution-makers informed?

The placid boy was anointed,
The politicians turned away.

I stood singular, childless, a witch in another age,
a witch now. Threatening exposure,

Not of my breast but of the complacency of us all:
that I didn’t wrench the boy from his mother’s arms
and run screaming from the draughty chapel.

Mother Mary smiled on in marble
A bloodless woman
Who ascended to heaven, never having induced it in another.

Outside the chill evaporated and I busied myself with tea-making
and congratulating the happy family.
A useful virgin
waiting for God to descend and prick my womb,
or at the very least to take my hand and walk by my side
down to Kommetjie beach
and smile at my lack of mystery,
my sense of injustice,
smile at the bobbing up-turned heads of a million drowned witches
in their silent procession to False Bay,
nodding out to sea.


Spaced Out

We’re almost nothing but space
Space, in our chemical factory,
The principle ingredient.

When I was younger, I would have said
That my space was filled with you,
Plus some other petty concerns.

Now you have diminished,
Leaving only the petty concerns
And space.

Following the principles of feng shui,
I de-cluttered, made space
For another god. But it seems space is all there is.


I watched the joggers running by the sea and imagined each one
Translucent, leeching molecules in speed lines behind them,
The following runner merging with their plume.

And I realised this is what we do when we breathe,
Which is why I want to breathe close to you, jogging behind for maximum saturation,
To jettison the petty concerns into empty space.


Scorpio

Between my skull and Scorpio – nothing,
Its curling tail mirrored by the moonless Silvermine Road.
As children we liked to imagine running on and on without stopping
and ending up where we began, testing the shape of the earth,
the one that Columbus “circumnavigated” – surely the longest word ever,
so long that it joins up again if you could say it in one breath – and
didn’t fall off.
If the universe is non-commutable, and shaped like a Moebus strip,
I could drive my Saab convertible off the edge of Muizenberg
running on and on, and end up where I began,
facing the same direction
with the same but by now mouldy cake
that I forgot to share with my friend, still in my bag.
(Though it could be useful on my journey).
Still with the same thought
that there is a lot of nothing
between Scorpio and my skull.


Rain again

Today the earth turned slowly,
each degree of rotation creaked
like an old man’s bones.
We are all waiting for the rain to stop
sheeting down its grey veils of misery.

Nobody wants to look at the view
through a tear-streaked window,
to see only our creation:
the charcoal glistening tarmac and concrete walls,
swishing cars and blocked drains.
The mountain beyond cloaked it seems, forever.

To look out of my window
you wouldn’t believe a mountain ever existed;
that Sunday feeling that we are so alone,
trapped together in a painting by Hopper,
marking time before the brash light of Monday morning
clears away the shadows of the week before.

Then we can resume our lives,
a DVD flicked off pause,
and with relief see once more Our Father mountain
protecting the Mother City.

There is a mountain behind Johannesburg too,
Only you have to be underground to see it.
And there’s mountains on the moon
but they bring no rain, no rain,
only a drizzle of grey shimmering light
leaking and dripping,
obscuring what we know is there
on the other side.


Brokeback Mountain

The frozen tears of candle wax
Dripped from the bathroom window ledge
Last night when men loved each other.

Voyeurs, we watched the lonesome end
Drank wine, or slept through all their pain,
Not daring to repeat the scenes.

Intruding in my living-room
Their passion was embarrassing.
This is why we want to kill them.

Not because we were untouched -
We were once – by such torrid love
But we knew then the end is grim.

With bleary heads we made our way
Back to our more familiar rooms,
We did not mention it again.

2006 - Gerrard Chaiken

THE ROOM WITHIN
by Gerrard Harris Chaiken

There is a room
Inside me.
Inside me,
Another shelters.
What do you see?

I am the window
To the room
Inside you.
Will you look at me?

I am the room
Inside you.
Will you open the door?

You are my room.



G’S POEM TO BE CONTINUED
by Gerrard Harris Chaiken

These are the spaces between the lines,
And the spaces between the spaces,
Here the wind of the mind winds
Between faces and places of empty pages
And unwinds dreams like spools of cotton
Of consciousness, knitting knots
Of memories and reflections into tapestries:

Terror and tyranny, delight and ecstasy
All tapped into, typed and taped
With technology’s immaculate perfection
And faultless reckless reproduction:

Here my; sightless fingers seeking solace,
Find home upon a plastic keyboard,
And hovering soul, released
From the tyranny of poetic form
And the slavery of sonnets,
Strikes yet another note
To ring the bell of pain that sets poets free..

Here the splice of storm that racks
The writer and thinker to devise new means
For walking upon the water of life’s petty moments,

So that celestial, and almost forgotten minutes
Of perfection, desire, revelation, dream
Return, as each and every day’s damning
Or liberating energy transforms breath

Into beauty, despair into dance,
Rock into water, blood into wine,
Wine into Love,
And Love that turns eternal loneliness
Into crazy dance, that mad desperate dance
Of “why not now…why not here…why not…?”


FLEAS
by Gerrard Harris Chaiken

My furious fuehrer fingers
Stalk across dogs’ bodies,
Pursuing mercilessly these fleas
Fleeing in the forests of fur,
Fingering and flicking,
Squeezing and squashing
Into little bloody black
Microdots of murder,
Smearing death and destruction
Across my pale fingertips.

These fingers would know
No guilt or blame as they
Issue forth to fight these
Tiny bloodsucking dragons
Who parasitically prey
Upon their loving hosts.

But with each castanet click
Of nail upon living being
So microscopically small,
So active and inventive
As they persist in their
Concentrated hunting,

I cannot help but wonder
Why my sleepy conscience
Suddenly pricks me so,
Feeling just like a flea
Parachuting onto my hand,-
-One last frantic bite
Before the fatal blow descends!


BUDDHA-BIRDS
by gerrard harris chaiken

Buddha-birds
Of beauty
Sing sutras
Of serenity
In trees
(That are less
And more
And nothing else
But trees)
Upon mountains
Which are
Mountains:

Melodies
Beyond these
Words
(Woods, trees,
Leaves,
Branches, seeds,
Woods)
Worlds
Upon worlds
Within worlds
(Fruit, flowers,
Blossoms)…

Gazing
Clearly
Uncluttered
At a swanshaped cloud
Floating majestically
Upon a sea of blue:

Suddenly
The clouds clap
And in a whip of wings,
The sky takes flight


CHAMELEON
by gerrard harris chaiken

I am
Chameleon:
Hiding
And flaunting
My beauty
Simultaneously.

I do not lie,
But blend and meld
And melt
Into myriad
Colours
So inimical eye
Becomes blind
To the miracle
Of me.

I am dull dolt
Then dazzling
Molten hues.
If you could see me
In the flash of an eye
It takes for me
To catch my fly,
I would trap you
In my beauty.

You use me
As a metaphor-
Flexible changeable
Adaptable
Even cunning-
A creature
For all seasons-

And yes, I
Am all of these;
But this too am I:

Lost in the love of being-
Being
In the miraclemaze
Of changing sky
Whence I drop
Onto a net of leaves;

I am the patience
Of the hunter, and
The patience
Of the sufferer;

I am the colours
Of the rainbow
That grows
In the eye of love:

I am Mirrormind:
I chameleon,
Am you!


COCKROACHES
by gerrard harris chaiken

Two cock
Roaches mating
On the verandah
Wall – well out
Of the pouring rain:

So engrossed in
One another,
They didn’t even
Notice me
Hanging out the washing.

Somehow to me,
Cockroaches had seemed
To spring unborn
Fully grown-
I had never known

Nor cared
How they bred
Or birthed,
Only bent
On their forced removals –

So intent
Upon each other
In silent sexual
Concourse,
I felt ignored,

And then a further
Blow to my self-esteem,
I wondered
If I should apologize
For my crude intrusion!

Perhaps to them
I was mere other,
Doomed to human
Form, imprisoned in
Perpetual exclusion

Long exiled
In rough extrusion –
Humped form
Shadowy upon
Their electric sun!

I hastily slung
Wet rags upon
The glistening lines
And sped inside
Where I hoped to hide

My jagged edges
In some book, or
Like a scavenger,
Some crumbs of old bread,
Before I too was treaded dead!


DEEP-SEA-DREAMING
by gerrard harris chaiken

Catching me unawares,
Crabby crabbed time
In his tricky tacky way
Fastens himself
To my pulsating wrist:

Prods pricks pokes me
Pinches me with pincers
Precise and as tight
And tenacious as
The tentacles
Of an obstinate octopus.

Taking my pulse
In his handcuffing grip
To measure the momentum
Of my moving mind,
To count the dormant
Beat of my lazylife, to fathom
My longforgotten heart,
And clasping, clawing,
He clings to me, pinching
Me to see if I am asleep;

Then trying to seduce me,
Lays his carapacecorpse
Along the length of my body,
And kisses me,
Biting my; lips
As lovers sometimes do!

In wetsweat,
I awake,
And see
That I was dreaming:
The endless day forgets
Herself sometimes,
And has a nightmare
Of the black knight of time…

Naked and newlyborn,
I arise once more
And dive
Into the depths
Of just another day…


MOTHER AND CHILD
by gerrard harris chaiken

Now I father
My mother
Who mourns
Her husband
Friend lover
With a grief
Growing deep
And unfathomable
As the depths
Of the sea,
Rampant
As a bushfire
Implacable
As the mountain.

Now my own aging
Dying body becomes
Graceful to give
Momentary respite
From the tyranny
Of time,
And the terror
Of waiting
For the death
She dreads,
Yet half desires.

Now I learn
To dance and fling
Arthritic arms
To the peeling ceiling.
I lean towards her
But she wants
No warmth
But that from him,
Whose cold body
He long ago
Abandoned.

I bring her flowers
But she worries
How they’ll fade
This very evening.

I sing her songs
In cracked falsetto
Or brave bass,
But she wants
No voice
But his, whose
Vocal cords
Were silent
Long before
He even left
Earth far behind.

“Mom,” I say, “Mommy,
Dad is talking
To you right now-
Can you hear him?
He is around you
Surrounding you
Right now,
With all his love,
And all his might,
And all his hope-
Can you feel him…?

But her hope’s long
Since been abandoned,
Even with the beloved
Body buried
In plot no. such and such,
Marble marked
“Love is stronger
than death”

“Mom,” I try again,
“Dad is telling you now,
Right now, how much
He loves you,
Always has,
And always will…”

But these words
Of love she wants
So much
To hear
Must come
From his lips
Alone,
Or they fall
Upon ears deafened
By his dying
In a pool of black
Thick blood
Upon their marriage
Bed of pain
And pleasure.

Now must I mother
My faith
That it may become
Immoveable
As the mountain;

Now recollecting,
Must I maintain
The master’s words
That I may remain
Unmoved
By the (empty) threats
Of her fading eyes,
Her palpitating heart,
Her bruised skink,
Her falling hair,
Her broken heart.

Now must I master
My own fear and grief,
And sit at the foot
Of the master,
Like a simple
Stonecutter at the foot
Of the mountain,
And cut stones
Of sorrow, sickness,
Desolate grief,
Giving ear
Only to the good news
Of eternal immortal
Immutable Life;

That I may create
Words and works
Of beauty and peace,
To lighten the load
Of lovers and friends
Who fear the parting,
Who dread the end:

Saying to all of you
Who mourn,
Who pine and fear and fade
And long to go:
“Be of good courage!
There is an end
To suffering…”

2006 - Ilana Slomowitz

BLINDNESS AND LIGHT
By Ilana Slomowitz

Blindness and light meet
Colours of confused clarity
Holding the void in its fragility
While touching nothingness
As the illusions becomes reality
Blindness and light meet
The solid the stable and the concrete
The guaranteed, the dependable and the predictable
The desire for a magic formula that works
Like ever changing quicksilver
Through fingers it slips away
Transforming shapes and textures
Darting here and there
Never to stay
In an explosion of resistance with nagging persistence
That tares at my gut and gets in the way
Denial and struggle together greet
Colours of confused clarity as
Blindness and light meet

FREE FALL
By Ilana Slomowitz

Stretch out your hand , meet your soul,

Questions, Passionately, Fearless,

Without fancy invitation

Poems grow, of this expansive mother earth.

Indulge, interpret, ever listening,

To the burst of spiritual re-birth

The marriage with God grows with high frequency.

The insight of a stranger’s intuition

Is caught in silence to urge the old

Throughout time to taste both love and war.

No time to waste.

Names crowding sleep trimmed and wrapped,

Are living here their dreams so deep, yet trapped.

TOUCHING THE EARTH
By Ilana Slomowitz

Touch the earth inside my being
Hands deep in clay
Take it, hold it mould it
In the clay I play

Hands deep in clay
Wafting clouds
like chiffon scarves
In the clay I play

Solid ground beneath my feet
like chiffon scarves
Wafting clouds
Fading out of sight

Touch the earth inside my being
Take it, hold it mould it
Solid ground beneath my feet
Fading out of sight

2006 - Astrid Dillon

"Crossmaglen Days"
By Astrid Dillon

We walked in the old country
where North meets South at Crossmaglen...
I.R.A no-man's land, now dismantled.
We walked there,
treading on the memories
of a People in conflict about religion and belief.
Treading on the bones of the past,
across the green fileds in our Wellington boots.
The scuffs and sods of black Celtic soil
beneath our feet...
where other feet had trodden,
farther back than fact or theory.
We walked to the distant hill
where the sentinels of ancient trees stood in a circle,
dumb guardians to a sacred Ring Fort
and a Pagan stone-walled tunnel,
claustrophobic-green, dark access to a pure spring lake,
down, down, far.
I paid homage to the dead and made a wish.
We walked through pastures and Neolithic ruins,
where I saw a cow with a large cancerous growth
where there should have been an eye'
It was cracked and bled a bit
a trubitary of red blood ran down her bovine snout.
I turned, but it hurt me to walk away...
she, staring after me, with her one good eye.
We walked away into the hazy distance
where we fed immaculate swans on a mirage lake.
We took photographs, smiling.
But, that night, in the silent chrysalis of my bed
I asked God if He cared about the cow
standing in the dense, dark alone-ness of night...
with one festering, sightless eye. Bleeding,
while the world turns on an axis of Purgatory
and limitless pain?
"As it was, so it shall continue to be!"
was the answer I got
caught on the early wind
at Crossmaglen.


"Departure"
By Astrid Dillon

I think there had been an argument...

We drove through the cracked, puzzled shadows,
crawling across the landscape
under a shroud of scattered stars.
My mother, a cardboard silhouette, as she drove
her halo of hair glowing
against the curtain of night,
and I lay on the backseat
of the old faded Fiat.

I think there had been an argument...

and we drove along the strip of road
cutting through the Motopos and the ruins of the Ancients
scattered in the hills.
We drove 'till the land grew hard and red
and the flat-topped trees stopped growing
and the agate sky turned from night.

I think there had been an argument...

Then, we left my dear father there,
his solitary figure casting it's lengthy shadow
across the hastening evening light...
we drove and drove
until we reached the large, safe harvest
of my red-haired Grand-mother's love.

I think there had been an argument...

Those days of sitting on my father's shoulders,
my childish head in the clouds, were gone!
The days of "fire walks" through long elephant grass
and stones' unturned...revealing centerpedes
were over.

I think there had been an argument...

The night we left my home
in Central Africa.


"The coming"
By Astrid Dillon

You bring me to the surface of sleep
with a sigh...
a calypso of gathering sensations
you open my mind with your hands,
skin me like a peach
and devour my naked body
with your tongue.
I drape the smooth sheet of my hair over you,
a shroud of desire
as you shape me

So, come to me, come my love.

I genuflect before you
pay homage to your manhood
my mouth knows no boundaries
to your intimate curves, so smooth and sweet.
I reserve the inner sanctuary
of my soft and sacred space, for you

So, come to me, come my love.

I am the sand, you are the sea
gently washing up on me,
Do you feel the surge, the tide, the moon?
symbiotic merging, all together, soon...
you rise onto the patient beach of my body
like a wave, sucking back
and pulling me onto you

So, come to me, come my love.

When you have opened me and wet me
stroked my inner reaches and outer shores
with hands that have lingered
in this world
I'll ask you to look into my eyes,
capture your hidden, wanton desires

So, come to me, come my love.

Your penetration pierces peripheral vision
of my own fantasy
divides and merges into an arpeggio
of light ecstasy,
our universes collide and explode
in our private super-nova...

So, come to me and be my love.

2006 - Linda Ntswaki

GOD HAVE MERCY ON AFRICA
By Linda Ntswaki

God, have mercy on Africa
She embraced visitors
Opened her loins, her shores and her soils
They trampled on her with metal stud heels
They have exhausted their humility
And got past being nice to one another

God have mercy on mother Africa
Ripped and torn apart
Stripped naked and deformed her figure
Her beauty scarred
Abused, suffocated
And chained her internal system

Divided the land
Tilled her soil with colonist morality
Stole her mountains
Ground her minerals
And her children
Detached here bond and
Turned her against herself

God have mercy on Africa
God have mercy on mother Africa

Now, the visitors claim
To give her back
Stability and peace
They stake their claim in her development
In redemption of the poor
They want to make her fit in...

Degrading and insulting the least left of her

How can a thieve stabilize its victim with good intentions
When he keeps coming back to boast and brag
About the riches he stole yesterday in the victim’s house.

Mother Africa forgive
But never forget

2006 - Mike Cope

Hot
By Mike Cope

Hot Saturday early evening out with Dave
looking for some girl in the city bowl,
lost in a tangle of sloping streets,
popping VW Beetle, slowing down
around corners to read the signs.
In a garden a fire, some people braaiing,
we’ll ask them if they know the way,
the street. We click-rattle the old
gate-latch open, and when we reach
the stoep an old man in a gown
staggers, eyes popping, face all lines
of agony, his shed’s ablaze and he’s dying!
We put the fire out, hand the man to the late
fire brigade. Never did locate Dave’s date.

I loved attacking that fire. All the wood
around the door, the back wall and one side
were a horde of young flames eager to strut.
We had the hose. It turned the smoke
to steam. We kicked out the damaged burning
beams. I feared it might light my hair,
got Dave to use the hose to make me wet.
Dripping denim jacket, spraying wide
swathes of water, the jet a cold lance
to the hot little flames, straining not to choke,
we went in and killed it. Then turning
back out, soaked, streaked and gasping air
and laughing, we left just as the fire truck
pulled up. The guy survived, with luck.



Two sentences came in
By Mike Cope

Two sentences came into my house;
one was short and brusque, the other
more wordy. They came in uninvited,
pushing past as I stood by the door.
Once inside they seemed quite businesslike:
their presence occupied the rooms,
the short one taking books from the shelf,
the other opening the filing-cabinet

pulling out files and spilling papers
on the passage floor. The longer one
had a clever argument, tying my words
in knots before I could form them,
so that finally I remained silent as the
other, the clipped one, tore pages
loose from the books, crumpled them,
and with hasty efficiency piled them

in the fireplace and plied them with
flame from matches in a rattling box.
Being themselves speech, neither spoke,
either to me or to each other, and I,
finding myself speechless, joined
their silence. Soon the three of us
left together, and I am unable
to say whether I was under coercion.

2006 - Kechil Kirkham

Psychotherapy
By Kechil Kirkham

To be self-aware
Makes no sense
When the image in the mirror is three-dimensional
Only through visual illusion,
And when I hear my own voice,
It is through a filter of my own distortion.

But tell me,
If I have sex with myself,
Which is it – the id, or the superego
That comes first?


About Words
By Kechil Kirkham

Yesterday’s words spill out over my shoulder
In black and white, fading.
They are embarrassing.
Did I really make them
Or did they find me first?
You see, this is happens when you don’t drink,
Poems about words, about words.


Nothing to write about
By Kechil Kirkham

There’s nothing to write about, I explained
Now that I’ve given up all of life’s pleasures,
And along with them, the pains.
Nothing to write about.

The bird takes off in a metaphor of feathers,
The earth continues chugging around the sun –
Or is it the other way round?
Who cares but the star-spangled poet.

And there I was in the kitchen at night,
Making toast.
Toast fit for a king,
A king of toast.
Brown wholewheat unsliced dripping in butter,
Hot toast.

When suddenly my pen, my dried-up pen
Was skittering across the page again!
Tea and toast,
Tea and toast,
Of all life’s pleasures
This is the one I like the most.


I keep no diary
By Kechil Kirkham

I keep no diary save the restless ticking of my soul,
Only the faint impression of events now long since past,
Red-shifted, hurtling away in space empty and vast,
Whilst I stand still and wait for the collision of a future yet to fall.

The picking of the holly, taken down amidst the snow,
Cycling to school in the early morning dark dulled with sleep and hush,
The roadside dimly lit, white breath, and shoes filled with molten slush,
Such things as knitted balaclavas, gloves, ineffectual against the cold.

Winters, summers, their imprint etched into the memory of these cells,
Though these cells have so many times died, forever lost,
So what is it that knows the first peripheral tingling of the frost,
Or can after a lifetime differentiate between a thousand smells?

The present and what is next to come is quite enough,
To grapple with whatever my imagination cannot hide,
With other people pressing in on every side,
The pusillanimous demands of so much stuff.

Never mind additional records making themselves heard
Above the crashing din and white noise of the here and now,
How I would love to filter out at least a third,
Then trace by heart a purer melody and to sing out loud.


The Proposal
By Kechil Kirkham

Today I received a proposal of marriage.
I would be wife number four!
Just as well I’m not Chinese.
Yesterday I won the lotto,
and the day before my car
automatically fixed itself.
Tomorrow will bring the smoothing of my wrinkles
and the lover I never got to kiss will declare that
he cannot live without me
and that he didn’t mean it
when he judged me unattractive.
After all, as a photographer he is qualified
to speak of visual beauty,
as I am to speak of luck.
We create our own.
Which is why people describe me as
“creative”, prone to create,
to fantasise, to make a better world,
to see the hungry fed, the meek possess all they survey,
the lowly rise up before Parliament
wearing crowns of eagles and diamond smiles.
And as for the enigmatic and foolish,
we will persevere in our fantasies;
that beneath the sham there is a rock of immutable truth,
a stone of wisdom,
and a tiny pebble of something you call reality.

2005 - Barbara Fairhead

PLEASE NOTE: some poems have been published elsewhere. Where possible we acknowledge this.

THE MATRIX
By Barbara Fairhead

This year I took a fatal step out of the matrix:
and with the turning of my face,
shattered the remnants of that constricting mould.

I took a step out of the house that has grown me:
That house of orthodoxy which, however elegant its desire
to protect its own - ultimately destroys us.

I stepped out of that garden
with its famous tree:
for no free wind may blow within
its high-walled acreage.

And now
I step over that terrifying and beckoning edge
and fall -
into the dark song of a forgotten woman;
into the fierce and sudden touch of her embrace;
her naked heartbeat,
and the fragrance of wild that lingers in her hair.

I do not have the words yet for her song,
for I am still remembering:
and the oceanic heave and fall of those lost cadences move
like sonorous shadows beneath the threshold of memory,
half remembered, like a dream that haunts the edges of night
and shape-shifts into flight upon the wing of dawn.

I do not have the words yet for her song -
but I have the breathing of it:

A sweet breath that breathes me,
pink-tongue-panting,
animal eyes lazy as dreaming,
and slit-lidded
against the noonday glare
of heat and thorn;
soft-slung in shade and shadow,
a sleek animal,
finely tuned,
female,
black,
with the heat on her, waiting:

I step out of the matrix
into the black wind.

2005 - Andries Samuel

PLEASE NOTE: some poems have been published elsewhere. Where possible we acknowledge this.



‘nor marvel if a thought should weigh a star’
(after e.e.cummings)
by andries samuel

like a blunt barbed arrow
i lie spent
upon my pillow
softly dying

arms and legs akimbo
outward flexed
face down sideways
softly flying

hurtling with no velocity
or speeding into
null gravity – destination
softly drawing

and here i must admit i know
that spaghetti i will be
as destination’s gravity
will take my head - faster
than my feet can go


...
by andries samuel

my daughter
is a little gecko

she basks in love
as in sun

planes wall and ceiling
do not supersede her cling

she dances with my legs
she swans with my life

how the hell do i get away from
where there is no cover inside me
just hard wounds
that smell of selfishness
banal needs
that smell of greediness

her tacky wartfingers
have a hold on me
and her finestring tail
curls me over


langpad I
by andries samuel

the empty black soil of the karoo
shows in scarred flaps through the bush
ridges mined hollow like a broken tooth
filthy green powder bleeding hard
from under layers earth crust stranded
like arks on soft cones of sand

flat breakings of rock crumbles softly
powders flaking stone as if light
about to drift up like brushings bush
stone outcroppings root gnarling up
into the heavens before again silver
bleeding through horizon down the highway

from in front and disconcerting
cars shoot by like blinking eyes
winter poplars splash columns yellow
with green mould shoot up jets
through the frizzy black bush cloak
the only transience the colour

of sheep and poplar

2005 - Jonty Driver

PLEASE NOTE: some poems have been published elsewhere. Where possible we acknowledge this.

Walking to the Paradise Gardens
By Jonty Driver

i.m.Griffiths and Victoria Mxenge

“No government can forgive.
“No commission can forgive.
“Only I can forgive. And I’m not ready yet.”
A witness at the Truth & Reconciliation Commission

You let men ride over our heads
We went through fire and water
But you brought us out into a place of liberty
Psalm 66 v.11

Why stand we then in such jeopardy
Every hour of every waking day
Worse on those nights when intruders come
Crowding once again into our cells,
Grinning behind their masks, grimacing,
Shaking us from sleep? I tell you:
This was no black man; I could see
White skin between his gloves and the sleeves.
But the sergeant who caught me said, No,
This was our people, gangsters, bandits;
But I could see, I could see...

Like throwing stones at the wind...

Laughing, my tall friend in the front row -
At Fort Hare in Alice where the main game
Was debating, though with a sharp edge
Since the wrong words could send you to gaol
Or exile - signalled me to beware
That the question came from an informer
(Agent provocateur at the least...)

And then for a time Robben Island -
That other great university -
Afterwards, making trouble in the courts,
Just one step ahead, using the tricks,
Slipping down the alleys and byways,
Playing the law like the lawyer he was.

They were waiting for him at the cross-roads,
In a big car, black, a Ford, he thought;
They had torches, four or five of them,
And waved him down, and he thought maybe
There’d been an accident, a roadblock.
He should have swerved then, or gone faster,
But they would have caught him anyway.
They had done with talking now, he saw.

First our friends were murdered, then their wives,
Then the witnesses sent out of town -
Somewhere, anywhere, who knows, who cares?
The point is that no one comes to judgement;
And if (since?) there is no God nor will they.

So many people, so many deaths:
And it shouldn’t be just those we know
Who matter; but it is our nature
(I guess) to care for those close to home.

What good does it do, telling the tale
Over and over again? Books get burned,
Words unlearned, the beggars coming to town.
I will tell you the story again, again.
Because that’s the way the world was made:
The lawyer come to such a lawless end -
But he fought back, using the knife he pulled
From his own chest, until someone slugged him
From behind. No passive victim this,
No acquiescence as the files trudged
Through the deep forests, with the guards
Only at distant ends. This one fought.
And he lost, one against four or five:
The white man and three or four hirelings,
Careless of death as the Gestapo.
Hacked, disembowelled, ears sliced off almost,
Disfigured - his blood made dirt of dust.

The lawyer’s wife too, because she
Would not keep her mouth shut, jabber, jabber:
I mean, we warned her, didn’t we, often enough?
Then we - in our turn - shut it for her.

And the horror of that execution
(Do you really want to hear the details?)
In a dark hut, with the children nearby,
And you may as well do the job properly
As the English say, penny and pound,
Or is it eggs broken for the omelette,
Or some image far, far worse than that?
What kind of man would shoot a child asleep,
Wrapped against the cruel cold in blankets?
It was Dirk Coetzee who cut my throat...

And still, when I fall asleep, there comes
Such knocking at the door I must wake -
And there’s no one there; but he comes back
Knocking, knocking, though I’ve barred the door.

Have we grown so far beyond judgement?
Have we learned anything? Have we taught
Our neighbours? Much less our enemies?
What is done is done and, if they see still,
They will sing for their children, and cheer
Loudly with their friends and their comrades.
Sacrifice doesn’t need to make sense,
Doesn’t need a future. It is done
Because without hope there’s no point, no point
At all. We must all stand up sometimes.

I walk now, with sun on my face, to the uplands:
I am walking through the azaleas
Of Kirstenbosch as the low clouds lift.
I am walking on the pine-needle paths
Of the mountain-contours above Tokai,
Up the stone-clad hillsides to the orchards
Of Pomerol, as bountiful as autumn.
I’m walking to the paradise gardens
High in the mountains above Shalimar
Beyond even the Gardens of Babylon.
Down in the valley there is Lake Nageem
Where the houseboats are moored at the jetties,
And the flower-sellers are drifting home.

2006 - Sandy Wetton

PLEASE NOTE: some poems have been published elsewhere. Where possible we acknowledge this.


RE-AWAKENING – on the 12th of April 2006
By Sandy Wetton

Good-looking man, windblown
striding the dunes.
No dog or companion,
comfortably – alone.
Features, the rock-hewn
plains of the aesthetic.
Frame, long, broad, muscled
and athletic.
Eagle sharp eyes
clear blue
of the palest hue
like low sun winter skies
on just such a day.
And as I feast my gaze
his radiant smile, in passing
has me casting
about my mind, to find
a lable for the unfamiliar tingle.
The twinkle and the lightness in my step.
I roar back at the waves in chortling mirth
at the recognition of the re-birth, of lust,
for life and a passing Adonis.

The grieving’s done.
You have become
the memory of a joyous past.
In celebration of which,
love, may still be possible.


BOTSWANA MEMORIES
By Sandy Wetton

1.
I love the place names that roll round my mouth
like ripe marulas, indigenous and sweet.
From Molopo in the dry and dusty South,
sand river meander where the boarders meet,
fossil from a more alluvial time.
Not flowing, past Tsagong and desert dunes,
dotted with feral sage and wild thyme,
to Ramatlabama and the customs post.
Mabuasehube, romantic and remote,
abutting the Gemsbok Park, where it plays host
to herds of antilope, on grassy plain.
Or travel East, follow the line of rail,
take the overnight train, again and again
the station name music echoes the rhyme
of wheels on tracks.
Lobatse, Gaborone, Pilane
Lobatse, Gaborone, Pilane.
The clicks and the clacks
Palapye, Mahalapye, Serule
Palapye, Mahalapye, Serule
till dawn in Francistown.
At dusk in the dining car you clattered past,
too fast, to catch the comfortable compounds,
that are Mochudi’s pride.
And while you slept, starch sheeted,
pillow puffed, Matlabanelo’s
pot-shard scattered hillside,
silently slipped by.
In the wee hours, the Swapong range
was lost, with hidden relics from the Iron Age.
And sipping steaming morning coffee,
through the siding at Macloutsie
as you round the final bend to journeys end.
Then further East, the great Limpopo,
green and Kipling greasy, flows,
fever tree banked and humming with mosquitoes.
Or West crossing the Shashi at Matangwan,
chewing Mopane leaves to slake your thirst,
through ever dryer bush to the great salt pan.
Mgadigadi, jewel of the Kalagadi.
Jewels of sound and jewels of carbon
Jwaneng, Letlakeng, Orapa.
Diamonds in the desert.

2.
Mkalamabedi fords the Botletle south of Maun,
where the river was born.
Daughter of the great Okavango,
mysterious delta of channels and Islands,
home to the shy sitatunga, the sly crocodile.
Marvelous maze of lost days
soaked in the sun and birdsong
of a makoro meander along
the Thamalakane and Boro
to the tiger fish bays
of Gomare, Namaseri, Shakawe.

A rattling ride over roads less traveled
to Kudumane, Katata and Kwaai,
where a twitch in the grass is a lion’s tail
and the king is the Tsetse fly.
Savuti, Moreme, Linyanti
form this small monarch’s domain,
this slayer of livestock and cattle
and patron of all wild game.
To the Chobe and Zambezi Rivers
where the hippo and elephant bathe
to far flung Pandamatenga,
and the rumoured elephant grave.

Past pans and pimples that pass for hills
in terrain as flat as a shambva
but as round in sound as Metsemetlaba,
Ramotswa, Notwane, Gaborone, Gabane
Hukuntsi, Mababe and Molepolole
Singing an anthem in my memory.


PLEASE NOTE: some poems have been published elsewhere. Where possible we acknowledge this.


WITCHCRAFT!
By Sandy Wetton

If I ensnare you
And against your will
Captivate, spellbind,
Hold you still
Within my web
Of paralising passion
Robbing you of reason.
If I make you loose control
Pledge heart, wallet, soul
Will you cry “foul”
Will you name me “bitch”,
Worse “witch”?
And swear on Halloween you saw me fly.
If with a flashing eye
My craft I ply
To tie you to me
With bonds of desire
And in your belly light a fire
Defying extinction.
Will I provoke rebellion?
If with curvaceous calf
I lead you on
To places you’d prefer not to have gone
To actions you had rather never taken.
Will you declare you were mistaken,
Lead astray, spirited away
From normal self.
If with my bare arm
I work a charm
Your resistance to disarm.
Then will I cause alarm.
If by some clever trick
I make you quick –en
Into virile, standing life.
A bludgeoning bulge
That will not budge.
That sits within your brain,
Causing you pain,
Demanding satisfaction.
Will you be stirred to action
And with some violence take
What you perceive was flaunted.
And when it’s done
Will you be haunted
By the bloodied thighs
Smashed face, uncomprehending eyes.
How will you plead?
That every girl child
Is a wanton something, wild,
Out to intoxicate and blind
The simple mind of man.
Will you decree that she
Henceforth must cover all
And only thus be seen,
Or not at all.
And will you blame
Your failure to contain
Your baser urges, saying,
“All is not as it seems,
they are the stuff of fantasy,
bad dreams, weavers of spells and schemes,
daughters of darkness, devilry and vice.
Wicked as witches, cold as ice,
Creatures of Halloween.”



From the saddle in Mexico – 2006
By Sandy Wetton

Ode to a plastic bottle – roadside between Tekanto and Bokoba
The hedgerows bright
with flitter light
of yellow wings
and creeper clings.
White, blue and purple trumpets
sound the summer way
of our idyllic cycle day.
But convolvulus and butterflies can’t hide
this symptom of a Nation’s lack of pride.

Humble origins
To-day’s trophies in purple and magenta
to my fellow cyclists I would enter
as a happy road-side found surprise.
These leggy legumes up the grass stems rise
and nod their heads along the way to greet me.
The wild precursor of the garden Sweet Pea.

Black-Jack
Black-Jack
You pack
A punch to prevent
A flee attack.
Khaki-bos,
Your other name.
Mosquito deterent
Your claim to fame.
Just the weed
We need
To repel bugs,
Indeed.

The road less traveled
What I discovered on the road to-day’s
intangible, will not go on display.
But listen and you may perceive her form,
which rides on eagles wings before the storm.
which like a wanton, wanders, wild, at will
and sings a siren song, “I hear it still”.
It strums wheel spokes, drums your tires on tar,
in a joyous ancient anthem of liberation.
Her name is freedom and her habitation,
the air you breathe as you pedal the road less traveled.

2006 - Ian McCallum

PLEASE NOTE: some poems have been published elsewhere. Where possible we acknowledge this.


FIERCE
By Ian McCallum

I like the word, fierce –
the way it aligns itself with
nakedness and solitude:
a fierce nakedness ...
a fierce solitude ...
And I like the way it holds
the word, fire.

I like the word, fire –
the way it ignites
the cutting edge of poetry
refusing to be nothing less than
a fiery edge …
a fiery tongue ...
And I like the way it is linked
to the word, wildness.

I like the word, wild –
how it weaves its way
between yes and no,
how it announces itself as
a wild anger …
a wild joy …
And I like the way it nurtures
the word, fierce.

I like the word, fierce -

2006 - Helen Moffet

PLEASE NOTE: some poems have been published elsewhere. Where possible we acknowledge this.


Helen Moffet was Feature Poet Off-the-Wall 6 February 2006
Here's her reading...

Tonight is a lot of firsts. This is my first poetry reading, and I’m going to read to you poems that represent first instances. In April 2004, I wrote two poems that were harbingers. Between mid-Oct 2004 and mid-March 2005, nearly 150 poems poured out like a geyser. This poem, one of my earliest, tells how it all started.

1. Foal-legs

(for Finuala Dowling)

It was Nuala who told me how.
But then she is a real poet.
“Just write down conversations,”
She said. “Including this one, if you like.”
I asked if she didn’t feel exposed,
Writing poems of bliss and headlong heartbreak.
“As long as they once were true, I don’t care
What people think or time does.”
I knew I lacked her courage,
But went back to my office,
And wrote two poems anyway.

Shocked at how easily words eased out,
And lines hoisted themselves onto their feet,
Gangling, wet and trembling,
The sense of achievement not in creating
A thing of truth and beauty, oh no –
But in standing up at all.

Next is the first poem I wrote. My poems were never meant for publication and performance; I wrote for entirely therapeutic reasons. Anyone who has battled with infertility will know that well-meaning people, with the kindest intentions, say the most brutally insensitive things. For me, poems were a way of answering back.

2. Without child

“Haven’t you had your babies yet?” she said.
It was a baby shower (of course).
This as tea and cake were passed
(the cups were porcelain, and pretty).
“Haven’t you had your babies yet?”
As if I had left my shopping on the bus.

Sitting among a welter of objects
(the likes of which I will never own)
Barn-animal mobiles, breast pumps,
Someone’s aunt’s exquisite embroidery
And packs of disposable nappies,
I realise I am the only woman present (again)
With neither baby nor fecund bump.
The biblical words “with child” in my case mean
Without child always bloody always
Without.

“How old are you, anyway?” she said.
And lit a cigarette.
(Four pregnant women, five small children present.)
I answered by reading a poem out loud
(the only happy one Sylvia Plath ever wrote)
I am still answering with a poem.

And this was the first poem I had published. I gave Gus 50 poems to look at, and of all of those, this was the one he chose for my debut in print.

3. Homo erectus

Erections are the most extraordinary things;
Especially to those of us who lack the mechanism.
One minute you pull me into an easy, affectionate hug –
The next, a third party has announced its presence:
Taking muscular shape against my belly,
A rude and raucous conjuring trick
(which I am tempted to call “sleight of prick”).
You are impressing me – literally.
By now I have the measure of you
All the way to my navel.
I note you are a most appealing size –
Promising, but not threatening.
I have questions: Is this proximity or desire?
How can something so implacable be so warm?
What does it feel like to have your own flesh
Do exactly as it pleases? And most of all,
What does one say at such moments?
“Excuse me, but your penis has taken a shine to me?”
What I’d really like to do
Is unzip and lucky-dip you,
Dabble my fingertips in your dew,
Test the tender texture
Of live rock sheathed in supple suede.
But I am too polite, too shy, too proud.

The kettle boils. I step back,
Make tea, keep close custody of my eyes.

But I carry your imprint for days,
Remembering that swaggering blare against my body –
Yours, at least, is not equivocal about me.

And now for something rather different. I have been “bergbevok” for as long as I can remember, and this poem is about the mountains of my childhood.

4. Route 62

What do mountains dream of?
Lying slumbering in the sheet of heat
Smoothed gently across the Little Karoo.
No wind. Only warmth, but it doesn’t press.
It floats, tenderly draping the spines and ribs
Into which history has folded these ranges.
Raging hormones of the earth’s adolescence
Blasted entire continents into the sky
Leaving the remnants to drift down and lie
Locked into peace, immobile, their flanks
Not even twitching in the drowsy summer
Afternoons. Now they breathe in time with
The slowly passing centuries of geology’s clock,
The beat too deep to resonate in our bones.
But the mountains hear it in their sleep:
Tick, and then the pause: aeons later, tock.

With thanks to Dan and Vindra Reddy

Many of my poems are unashamedly sentimental. In this one, I’m up a mountain (the Drakensberg this time) with someone important to me.

5. The Sentinel, 7 October 2004

Climbing the mountain with my father,
On a dry, wind-chapped spring day,
I realise this brings out the best in him.
I am reminded of a childhood,
In which he magically translated
The world for us, so that every rock,
Bird, bloom, bush, clod of earth
Spoke to us by name.
How patient he becomes,
Coaxing me up the slopes,
Alien and hunched, much bigger
And balder than in the softer Cape.
And courteous! He watches every step,
Every handhold – gently, “Always look
Before gripping a ledge – a berg-adder
Might be sunning itself.”
I have bigger worries: chest tight
At the thought of the chain ladder –
Its vertiginous drop.
But my dad has thought of everything;
At 67, he’s lugged a rope and gear along
So that he can belay me up and over my fears.

On top, giddy with relief,
I almost skip along the country’s roof;
But now my father has met several souls,
And is conversing at length in Sotho,
Of which I have only the courtesies.
As soon as we continue, I ask
A question straight from childhood,
“Daddy, what did they say?”
Still needing him to translate.

Oh God, we have reached that stage
Of starting to pack memories away
Against inevitable impossible loss.
Please God, let me keep this day
Always for when I need
A rope at my waist,
An interpreter for a world
Of unfamiliar tongues.

The poem below is the second of two songs I wrote for my friend Keith Martin.

6. Blessings

You are one crazy saint.
Out in the bush at 2am on a mercy mission,
To visit, comfort the newly bereaved,
You’re ambushed by drunken, adolescent “war vets” –
Savagely beaten, robbed, thrown in a ditch for dead.

You lay there all night long, counting your blessings.
Yes, really!

“Thank God it was gum-poles, not pangas.
Thank God they smashed my hip and not my skull.
Thank God it’s a warm night in Africa;
If this was Europe, I’d die of hypothermia
Before morning or help came.
Thank God for the softness of the mud;
For the sky freckled with singing stars
To keep me company through this travail.”

Those are two of my poems about individuals who are NB to me for different reasons, but here’s a poem that casts its net a little wider. I’m lucky to have lots of wonderful younger men in my life, and I wrote this for them.

7. In praise of younger men

It’s not just the obvious things;
Their bodies not yet freighted
With gravity or mortality,
Their recuperative powers in bed;
The most refreshing element
Is that for most, a cigar is just a cigar.
If I invite a man my age, or older
For lunch, or drinks, or tea,
He assumes it’s an assignation;
Swaggers in, certain of my desperation.
But for younger men, my suggestion
That we meet for coffee or a walk
Is always taken at face value.
And they rarely leer. If I catch them
Looking at my breasts, they blush.
They make such good listeners, too,
Enthralled by my travels and tales,
Instead of expecting me to be the one
To hang on every word they utter.

So raise your glasses to younger men;
In their innocence, they may be arrogant;
They’re randy, and sometimes astonishingly
Ignorant; but they were raised breathing air
Laced with equality. And this is why
I like them so much. They’ve not caught
The fatal habit: the tendency to patronize.

Now back to the rough stuff. This one revisits the perennial problem of what not to say to the childless. This poem is one that makes many people uncomfortable, but I have faith in it because Ingrid de Kok likes it.

8. The ovary in the arm, and other tales from the crypt

A woman undergoing cancer treatment has had her fertility saved after doctors transplanted her ovary into her arm. – Sunday Times, 14 November 2004

I am so sick of this; the way folk offer me
Dr Frankenstein’s laboratory,
Holding out science like some charm:
“They can do wonders these days!”
And “Have you thought of fertility treatment?”
Gosh, no. It never occurred to me.
I only know everything a layperson
Could ever digest – thanks to a cold collation
Of journals, the Internet, a dozen consultations
With specialists. I am only too adept:
Along with the miracles, I have the
Pulverising figures on failure rates
And crippling costs at my fingertips.
All this to jolt a speck of plasm into life –
While the compound interest of AIDS
Is multiplying orphans as we speak;
All I wanted was natural, normal
The everyday stuff; you know,
Conceiving in passion,
A common-place burgeoning
An ordinary breeding and birthing.
So little to ask for;
Beyond impossible to get.

What follows is an orphan poem that I pushed away, only to find that others loved it. Billy Dicey picked this for the Slug Award, which makes it my first prize-winning poem.

9. Mined

Loving me must be like visiting the Balkans.
I’m told it’s lovely there; seen the pictures
Of pastoral valleys, dappled woods
Secluded inlets of blue dispersing islands;
All dotted with monasteries, quaint villages
And stonework of antique masonry
Speaking eloquently of culture and craft.
But a flak jacket and tin hat are advised;
Over some innocent hill you’ll find,
Without warning, a site where violation
Has soaked into the earth, something
Has been razed, horror still haunts,
With shrapnel and tank-traps in the lulling grass.

And the history – the history! No matter
How hard you try, you’ll never quite grasp
Why one sniping shot triggers a world war.

The next two poems belong to a difficult period in my life, but in retrospect, what’s interesting is the amount of loveliness I kept finding around me.

10. Only in Cape Town

On a bitter day
In a bitter time,
I’m at a wedding
Overlooking Table Bay.

Across a sea shouting blue
Back at the sinking sun
A red container ship passes
As if drawn by a string.

This happens as the Iman
Intones a passage
From the Koran.
(Most merciful,
most gracious)
Voice and view splice
And for a slice
Of a second, I’m jolted
Into unexpected joy.

Written on the occasion of the marriage of Tazkiyah Banoobhai and Yunus Noordien.


11. Reply to Ariel

I wish my bones were made of coral.
I wish they lay in some turquoise cove
Clean ivory in cashmere water.
I wish my ribs were garlanded with
Stars and flowers, their fronds
Stroking in time to sea’s soft pulse;
With small fish flicking like paint
Through the bowl of my pelvic girdle
Gently rocking as a tropical tide
Hushes back and forth, back and forth.

Wish and hush, says the distant surf
The reef will keep you safe from my surges
As you lie free on the floor of the sea.

And this is probably the darkest I’ll read tonight. It’s in progress, so I’m going to try it all out on you, and see if I can hear where it should be trimmed.

12. Vigil

Please, a moment of stillness:
I’m watching myself die.
Holding my own hand
As my gene-pool drains away.

(Of my remains,
not one molecule will remain.)

Yes, thank you, I know the refrain:
“Anyone can be a parent”, and
“Have you thought of adopting?”
Right now, I have other matters
To attend. I’m keeping vigil
At the deathbed of my DNA,
My fingerprints, a thousand
Quirks bestowed by countless
Ancestors. The Cossack who
Bequeathed an affinity for horseflesh,
A great-grandmother’s coloratura voice
Someone’s photographic memory
Along with the knack of playing
Almost any tune by ear,
The familial tendency to myopia,
My unmistakably Jewish profile
And rain-washed complexion,
Courtesy of the Irish side.
A babel of voices, benefactors,
Bequeathers of personality,
All betrayed here: led astray
Down the dead end of my body.

(You have no idea. I will pass
none of this on.
Nothing. Nada. Nix.)

Anyone can be a parent
(though millions are unsuited to the job)
And I think about adoption daily
(social workers blanching at my sandcastle health)
But that is not the point.
I am watching myself dying,
And it’s dark in the cave,
Witnessing the last blue flame
Waver and shrink. Just because
The struggle is silent, makes it no less intense
Or intent. The life-force won’t surrender
Easily; and I need to bear witness.
So please, grant me just this:
This moment of silence.

(Shut up the lot of you:
shut up and let me pay my respects
in peace.)

The final poems are all in some way or another love poems. My dad already got a poem, so this one is for my mother.

13. On my most recent visit to the farm

You shook me awake at some witching hour,
Excited as a child anticipating Christmas;
Chivvied me into a dressing-gown
And Wellington boots, waving a torch:
“I want to show you something,” you said:
Muffled, muddled with dreams, yet trusting,
I tromped out after you, crunching across
The frosted garden, decked in silence and silver;
Down through the gate, towards the dam,
The longer grass now swishing. The moon had set,
Leaving the constellations holding court
In a sky molten with pouring stars.
“Look,” you said, pointing towards the ridge
Beneath the immense swirl of the Milky Way,
“You can see Libra rising.” And there it was,
Perfect, like those swoopingly elegant
V-shapes that signify seagulls
In illustrations in old-fashioned books.

Back in the house, the kitchen
Warmth a delicious reminder
Of how cold we’d been outside;
You heated milk with sugar and vanilla,
Enough for my father as well,
When he trundled in, fogged with sleep,
To ask what we womenfolk were up to;
Married to you long enough to
Grunt in understanding, find it normal
That you’d get up and go out in the middle
Of a winter’s night, just to look at the stars,
And want to share them with your adult daughter.

There’s not a woman alive who doesn’t feel
Schizoid about her mother:
But please don’t think I don’t know
How lucky I’ve been.

This is a love poem, and a political poem, and a religious poem. I am both a radical feminist and a practicing Catholic. This poem is why.

14. Mercy (we do not presume)

Why I am still a Christian?
And a Catholic to boot?
Much of what we profess
Improbable, often indefensible.
The notion of a loving God
Seems quaint, if not ludicrous
On a planet choking on suffering,
Chomped bare by locust greed.

Attending a lecture on the TRC,
We’re shown a film clip: well-known.
A mother, her body weary with grief
Confronts her son’s murderer,
Sweating in suit and noosed tie;
And after the racking recounting
Of an afternoon bloody with betrayal,
She forgives. Just like that. Her words
Outweigh all of holy scripture: first,
She says, I forgive because you
Are the same age as my son; second,
Because he is never coming back –
My not forgiving will not return him
To my arms; third, because Jesus on the cross
Said, “Forgive them, Father, they know not
What they do.”

A sob, sharp as a hiccup, leap-frogs from my throat;
An audible yelp of recognition: mercy. Mercy
At the heart of this faith only. No other religion
Asks anything so insane of its adherents: that we
Daily forgive those who trespass against us;
Turn the other cheek, relinquish all our claims
To vengeance, reprisal, even resentment.
This bizarre transaction works both ways;
It’s made prosaic through years of
Catholic conditioning: confession, contrition,
Penance (translation reparation); then comes
Forgiveness, falling into place. Because
It’s almost automatic, I seldom stop
To recall that this first buckled my knees,
Had me offering up the bare nape of my neck.
It still has me agog; the transubstantiation of
Mercy, its power to transfigure both sinner
And sinned against, entrance and dance us
Out of hate. It’s those who’ve lost the most
Who’re asked to set transgressors free;
Reclothe them in fresh humanity.

This is a more conventional love poem, about long-past love.

15. One of the only goodbyes I got right

The last time we made love
Was on a spring evening in London,
Birds gossiping and squabbling to nest.
Our borrowed bed was matronly and sagging,
Decanting you effortlessly into me,
The pleasure equally effortless,
Familiar, instant and extraordinary;
An act of art long perfected, entirely
Guaranteed to satisfy.
Afterwards, every nerve twittering
In contentment, I stayed in bed
While you dressed. We were surprisingly
Cheerful. We knew it was our last encore.
I watched you lope down the street,
Towards Holland Park, where
Billowing trees in Byronic green
Matched the heaping clouds showing off
An overblown sunset. Threw the window open,
One last wave, tempted to flash you,
Wanting you to leave laughing;
I loved you so much, and not enough.

We had one more chance, years later,
On a sun-dusted street in Cape Town,
Our bodies recalling the angle of yearning;
I came so close to keeping my mouth under
Your goodbye kiss, leading you back into the house.
There was no living soul to betray; only
That London street fresh with dusk,
The candelabras of the chestnut trees,
Window-boxes glowing with pansies,
Your walking away, released, waving, smiling.
I could not be unfaithful to that farewell.

And this poem, the last one I wrote, is one of my happiest. As you will see.

16. Bedtime (true) story

I can’t write a poem.
I’m much too happy.
And this teaches me about poetry,
and where it comes from.

I wished upon a star,
I rubbed the genie’s bottle,
and – this it where it breaks down, you see –
I keep reverting to Christina Rossetti:
“It is the birthday of my life
Because my love has come to me”.

My bestest dearest friend, lost, lost,
for years, on the dark side of Mad Bob’s moon.
At two hideous a.m., I sobbed,
hopeless as a child,
“I want Keith. I can’t bear this anymore.
I want him now.”

A week later, he arrived unannounced.
On my doorstep, I swear.
Zimbabwe had left him only the clothes on his back.
Not that this stopped him smiling. Nope,
poetry fails me now – I keep
singing “I once was lost, but
now am found.” Or repeating
the cadences of the Gospel
story of the prodigal son.
It is amazing grace.
It is a miracle.
Thank God it’s almost Easter,
so I can go to church and sing
Hallelujah Gloria Laudate Dominum.

And here poetry draws back
into the shadows, with good grace.
I don’t have the talent to burst into
wild sunbird song (I leave that to Christina).
I know the poems will come back.
For now, happy is all.

And as an encore:

17. The Visit
(after editing In Our Lifetime: the biography of Walter and Albertina Sisulu, by Elinor Sisulu)

The day after the book launch,
I am invited to the Sisulu home;
Walter wants to thank me in person.
On arrival, Albertina’s sprightly hug
Cannot diminish my awe.
I am ushered into the presence
Of the icon, an old man in a wheelchair
Crumpled dignity, all smiles.
First, a little homily to the assembled family:
“You see, if you want something done well,
You must ask a woman to do it!”
Then he gestures me closer, reaches
For my hand. I kneel at his slippered feet
(to kiss them would not seem extreme).
He launches into his formal speech
Of undeserved thanks and praise
(I will never again be so honoured);
As he winds up, he peers into my face,
Now streaming with foolish tears:
“I know you,” he says. “I know you.
From where do I know you?”
It turns out his prodigious memory
Has retrieved my face from a breakfast
Twelve years ago, during the first
Historic talks between the ANC
And the then-regime; time long gone.
He was kind, fatherly to me then;
Now his gift for connection spans the years
As it bridged more bitter divides –
Incarceration, a family scattered by wolves,
Political rifts, the whole bloody catastrophe;
Everything we could throw at him.
Nothing has dented, tainted that smile;
The dry fingers trembling in my clasp
The gaze, agate with age, seeing me clearly;
“I know you.” And feeling the force of that
Recognition, and still more, absolution,
I want to bawl into his lap, feel his hand on my head.
Instead I sit back (not a dry eye in the room),
Blow my nose, accept biscuits and tea.
The rest of the visit, I hold his cup for him
As we watch a cricket match on TV.

(With thanks to the Sisulu family, and in loving memory of Walter)

2005 - Karen Leigh

PLEASE NOTE: some poems have been published elsewhere. Where possible we acknowledge this.



origin
By Karen Leigh

rumi says
"with every word you break my heart.
you see my story written in blood on my face,
why do you ignore it?
do you have a heart of stone?"

who would have thought the thread was red?
the red trail of my hot need which leads to your door
the red leaf which carpets
which falls
which covers
the red radical blood at my root
i bleed
the red blood spilt
the red blood stains
the red thread connects.
who would have thought the thread was red
that leads back to me?

in the exquisite heart of the birdsong morning
i waken to your faithful welcome
calling me to rendezvous




initiation
By Karen Leigh

black the grave black its pull
jungle night devouring jaws
black the eyes that do not see
black are those who are not seen
black the heart that does not feel
black the life that is in hell
black the hole where i ought be
black the anger "look at me!"
black the pit in which i fell
black the stuff foul its smell
black the earth in which the seed
black the hope for things unseen
blind the trust that lies deep
awake o sleeper from your sleep

children play unknowingly
spring explodes
people exchange poems
we avoid getting stuck in the mud



you song. i sing
By Karen Leigh

your cutting green eyes
look see
sea-softened
soul's roll
its toll
so dark
so light
excite
me

velvet hissing waves
swallow us hollow
open
veins
cold blood
flows feels

tilt in my hand. slant to me
cool dark
my
mid-bright day

2006 - Geoffrey Haresnape

PLEASE NOTE: some poems have been published elsewhere. Where possible we acknowledge this.


NANOOK
By Geoffrey Haresnape

They packaged him at London Zoo
with full professional care:
his destination was New York
for exhibition there.

His claws were out like iron hooks,
and he was filled with rage:
He cuffed and slashed with frontal blows,
but could not break his cage.

At the quayside they winched him high
then lowered him below.
The liner was about to sail
if he could only know.

His cage was placed against the hull
below the water-line.
He grunted at the telegraph;
the steam’s hiss made him whine.

To New York City, to New York City
where men were rich and free..
To New York City, to New York City
and more captivity.

They had not been at sea for long,
not even for a week,
before an iceberg struck their side
which sprang a copious leak.

A glassy spur ripped through the plates
as frail as melon skin:
in passing it collapsed the cage
Nanook was captured in.

When water filled the bulkhead’s space,
he answered with a roar
and squirmed beneath the guillotine
of a steel safety door.

He padded down the passageways,
hopped up an ornate stair:
with every snuffle of his snout
he searched for open air.

On deck, the women did not laugh
nor watch their children play:
they were unlike the folk he’d known
on a Bank Holiday.

For here they cried and clustered round
to look down from the rail.
They saw the water’s icy sheen
and felt their spirits fail.

The gentlemen so loathe to wet
their patent leather shoes,
they feared great forces were at play
to drag them in the ooze.

Nanook observed the stern rise high:
the sinking planks were steep.
On all four paws he slithered down
to set off in the deep.

It was the longest, coldest swim
that he had known for years.
The pallid icefloes passed him by,
some edged with glinting spears.

His muscles stretched, his nostrils spread,
the ocean soaked his hair,
but he advanced with easy stroke,
and energy to spare.

He hauled out on a growler’s shelf
to shelter in its lea:
`Titanic’ sank before his eyes,
the ship that set him free.

A long, continuous wailing chant
came to his hearing there
from humans drowning in the night
with fearful screams, or prayer.

Nanook, he waited on the ice
till the last voice was gone:
then set his course towards the north,
and paddled strongly on.

Huge Ursa Major watched from far
among the sky’s white lights
and twinkled that the polar bear
was safe this night of nights.


The memento
(for L)
By Geoffrey Haresnape

The whiff was no dream
as we jumped from rocks
onto foot-sucking softness
of the wave-washed sand.
‘What a terrible pong!’
I heard you say.

At first we imagined
it was crap on our boots,
then, looking up-beach,
we caught sight
of a bolus
that the sea had brought up.

The Southern Rights were sounding
out in depths of the bay,
but this was a beast
which had gone shallow and wrong,
left behind by the tide
till its fins could not flap.

Our foxie was first
at the site of delicious decay,
his eyes closed in ecstacy,
ripping off strips.

`Voetsak!’
you cried,
afraid he’d be gorging
on worms’ eggs, or worse.

Like scholars at a midden,
we paced around the corpse,
surmising
points of entry
and the vital place
which once had hearthed
a fiery heart.

The clues were sparse.

Part of a backbone
showed vaguely to the eye,
squeezed from the blubber
like a splinter out of pus
by careful fingers of
a therapeutic sun.

One vertebra
alone
had surfaced,
dry and clean-
You asked:
‘Why don’t we get that?
For a garden ornament?
To put beside the goldfish pool, perhaps?’

I tugged and twisted
at its flanges,
used my pocket knife
to poke at gristly threads
or slash.

We prized the segment
from its spongy bed
and carefully worked it
down the hill of flesh.

Then came the portage
trudging car-ward
through the dunes.

Drilled with an
O
and skewered on a stick
it dangled
like a pendulum
between us.

For our excited dog,
so dense a bone
was noser-friendly.

I, too, was sniffing
round the thought
that it had spindled
in a living
spine.

I fancied
that I heard
a quick whale
rising
with a rumbling
hum.

A rainbow
seemed to happen
in the drizzle
of its blow.

I dreamed
of water sparkling
round a shadow
flecked
with white callosities.



CROSS CURRENTS
from the brain of Dr Severance Package, a retrenched Capetonian
By Geoffrey Haresnape
1.

Most countries would call it a ‘power-cut’
others a ‘power failure’
some even –shock-horror- a ‘black out’
but we have a new terminology
to match our new democracy.
‘Outage’-
what a quaint understated sort of word;
it seems to assure the hearer
that everything was planned
even though the leg of lamb defrosts,
the pc loses all its files,
Auntie Mimsie slashes her shin
trying to feel her way to the wc-
six vehicles collide at an intersection
where traffic lights have given up the blink
and megalitres of raw sewage
rendered pumpless
pour into the sea.

*

And politically correct,
oh, yes, ‘outage’ is so politically correct
like ‘educator’ and ‘learner’,
‘levelling the playing field’
and ‘people on the ground.’
In the circumstances,
only a formerly-advantaged
like Colonel Ffartt-Tremberly
of ‘Fantasy Forest’ , Constantia,
would have the gall to express this sentiment:
By Gad, Sir. An out-age is an out-rage.’
People will say
that whitey has a pro-blem.
He should go back to Piddletown-in-the-Bog
where his great grandfather came from.

At 4 a.m. I was driving my son
to run in an All-Africa marathon.
From Wynberg Hill
the lights of the South Peninsula
were stretched out level beneath us-
a web of silver and golden jewels,
comforting to the eye.
Suddenly
without warning
they were all extinguished
like a man may put out a candle.
‘I’ll huff and I’ll puff
and I’ll blow your World Class City out.’

*

Six hours later
listening to a battery radio
we heard Mr Strongman Imbali
of Eskom [or should it be Eskom-nie?]
explain: ‘The current outage
is due to a combination
of recent veld fires and
mist.’

Dr Albertus Dooshond
[formerly of the Apartheid Nats]
is now Minister of Progressive Initiatives
in the current Cabinet.
He has decided to set an example
in electrical economy
by fitting in his official residence
only low wattage energy-saving lamps
to replace the high-resistance
incandescing wire bulbs.
It is rumoured
he has also fitted a back-up generator system
costing 250 000 bucks
in case of outages –
but this is not part of his Press Release.

Low wattage energy-saving lamps
can be distributed free to the masses.
But each shack dweller
should not be dreaming
of a back-up generator system.

*

Meanwhile, the city mothers and fathers
burn thousands of high-energy lamps
along the highways
in the full glare of the noon.
We hear that this is done
to forestall freebooters
wishing to steal the cables.
But- just maybe-
they are wanting to check
that the current is still flowing
and that there are no outages.
Could this intervention
not be called
an inage?’

Ms Buzzoff Inyosi,
the alternative spokesperson for Eskom-nie,
has two other explanations
for two other
outages
which occurred.

One
resulted from birds
crapping
on the high tension cables.

The second was caused
when an intruder
let drop
a loose bolt
into the generator
of the number one unit
at Koeberg
the late-middle-aged Nuclear Power Station.

Sabotage has not been ruled out.

Buzzoff did not reveal
that investigators were pursuing possible links
between the intruder
and a conspiracy of Superman, Spiderman, Batman
and Magnetman
the whizzbang electronic supremo.

Who will receive
the higher performance bonus
at the end of the current calendar year?
Strongman?
Or Buzzoff?

2005 - Mike Cope

PLEASE NOTE: some poems have been published elsewhere. Where possible we acknowledge this.



They will turn away
By Mike Cope

They will turn away from us, and when
they turn, intending to pursue something
or moving with desire and yearning, then
we will see their backs diminishing.
They will not look back, or they will glance
and still turn­not from us, but to
something clear and better, to a dance
with unfamiliar steps (to us) or to
some Other one. Or maybe going down
a glass corridor, boarding a train,
they will turn away, and we, unbound,
facing their absence, filling it with pain,
or not, as we may choose, will also turn
and walk away and not look back and burn.


Max Raysman, Engraver
By Mike Cope

Mr Raysman's hands are a knot of hard rope,
the old skin stretched tight over bulging joints.
Milky eyes beneath the cloth cap hide behind
lenses. He reads the brief one letter at a time
through his spectacles and pebble loupe.
Seventy something years he's cut the bright lines
into the metal. The patterns flow in his hands–
scrolls and roses, lettering, Roman and cursive,
names and dates cut in trophies and the insides
of wedding rings, posies for nine-carat tie-pins,
sometimes the foliage on a gent's signet ring
deep-cut to bring the leaves to life. Max is dapper
with a trimmed moustache. His persistence is nothing
to make a fuss over. He keeps his tools sharp.

He's short, maybe five two, dressed six decades
out of date in a cardigan and flannel slacks.
He always undercharges. You have to bargain
with him to pay for what the work's worth.
"Twenty Rands," he says. "Are you sure?
It seems too low. How long did it take you?"
He huffs. "All right, make it thirty." Over years
his hands have turned wooden like the handles
of the burins they hold. 'Stickles' he calls them–
they have rounded hafts a bit bigger than walnuts–
and his hand, as it rattles the key on the gate,
is cupped arthritically to fit that shape.
The left's more lithe. It hasn't worked as hard,
but the patterns move through the right. It must go on.

2005 - Gus Ferguson

PLEASE NOTE: some poems have been published elsewhere. Where possible we acknowledge this.


LOVE POEM
By Gus Ferguson

Will my soul have memory of me
when it returns as chimp
or chartered accountant?

Will it, by my death, have felt
liberated or abandoned?

Might it, at least, feel
an ephemeral yearning
for you, your fragrance
and your wonderful laugh.
Published in
In the Country of the Heart (Jacana)


Snail-love
By Gus Ferguson

How lovely is this sensual land
Beyond the sexual peak,
Where slow and languid flows each gland
And, foreplay takes a week.

2005 - Mark Espin

PLEASE NOTE: some poems have been published elsewhere. Where possible we acknowledge this.



LETTER IN DECEMBER
By Mark Espin

The echo of versatile tongues
bursts across the vista of hills
Arrogant young men in fashionable attire
hold séances with terror,
detail their accomplishments
with the pornography of dead eyes
and sun themselves in the glory
of fraternal love;
an extenuating circumstance
in this rage that scorches the land,
this pathology that mutates.

The light incinerates the page;
the charred remains disintegrate in your hand
as you frantically attempt to retrieve
the messages of revelation written
in the scarcely decipherable hand
of an unknown prophet who surrendered
his life and his art on a distant hill.

Forgotten men stride along highways,
barter herbs from the fields,
vaguely recall their language;
their melodies of the moon and the mantis,
in the inebriation of the afternoon sunlight.

The words mirage in the haze, but fade,
being damned forever for its crumbling
from the cursings of the master.



WATERMARK
By Mark Espin

"The same goes for love, because one's love, too,
is greater than oneself."
JOSEPH BRODSKY (1989)

An unidentified insect has desecrated
the paperback volume of Brodsky's essays.
The margins of the pages are perforated
by minute excavations that reveal nothing
but the vacancy of the simple artifact's material.

I am allowed but a thin time for reading.

While the lines of words are fractured
by the perpetual entanglements of ordinary living,
I draw my thumb across the open end of the book
and simulate a cinematic blur of monotype black
on the faded manila bond.

Your presence implies the consolation of lavender;
and the allure of abundant mauve,
revives the enactment of inept vanities.

I press my lips upon the rosary of your tender gestures
but stumble into the perfumed void you had once occupied,
fall half aware across the threshold of sedate reason.

The book begins when the final page has been turned.
The memory of reading, the memory of you,
crosses over into the mind's veil of frayed parchment
becomes another motif of the vague, muted blues,
a watermark in the anthology of the heart.



INHERITING RAGE
By Mark Espin

At three one morning my grandfather
rose from his bed in his long johns
and winter vest, ventured into the garden
and plucked unripened nectarines from the tree
to placate his interminable rage.

A random collection of perished leaves
And a division of an errant branch
Were the unfortunate casualties of this incident.

On a previous occasion he applied
his intemperate nature to the broad lemon tree
but wounded his hands on the defiant spikes
of the thorns. As a revenge, he disinfected
the lacerations with the squashed out juice
and impaled the redundant harvest upon the thorns.

His eccentric supervision of the garden
has since been terminated. He now makes
clay pots as a therapeutic exercise,
and spends the rest of time raking twigs
in the garden of the hereafter as atonement.


THIS NEW AGE
By Mark Espin

The grief of orphans is interred
in a vault of legislated silence
while the suave bridegrooms of infinite wealth
lisp their conceits along the torn fabric
of a luminous, static sky,
leave a trail of their grim vanities
like flatulence in the atmosphere.

The monstrous lust for murder
is the only paragraph of vital significance
as the blunt eyes of despots are drowned
in the depths of their vile largesse.


AN INTENSE SUN
By Mark Espin

We walk the mountain's undulating paths
while the city stirs in the mist and the smog
that stretches across the range of grey blue peaks.

The unseen birds frolic in the thick line of trees;
their calls resonate like the music of your heart.

The path is covered in a layer
of brown pine stalks that crackle
as we traverse its unknown course.

The climate is silent as we gesture
our intimate words amongst
the mutterings of the green leaves
that the sun momentarily anoints
with the intensity of its delicate light.

2005 - Winslow Schalkwyk

PLEASE NOTE: some poems have been published elsewhere. Where possible we acknowledge this.



Too Many Times
By Winslow Schalkwyk

Too many times
I am crippled by my indecisions,
Inhibitions and restrictions
And I find myself unable to see
The beauty of the path before me

Too many times
Fear clouds my perception
And leads to the resurrection
Of habits I thought were forgotten
And my being seems anchored to a past
Filled with memories of pain and abandonment
That fuels the ever-present, the ever vigilant
FEAR waiting hungrily for an opportunity
To make it’s presence known

Too many times
I find myself lost deep in a rhythm
Bound by unspoken words
And blinded by my addiction to a life
That holds no rewards
For the battles which my soul has fought
& I find myself lost deep in indecision
Caught in between my duty and my vision
When my daily existence has become an incision
On this path towards righteousness that has become my mission
& I struggle to find meaning
Behind this feeling of serenity that washes over me
Even though I have lost my job, again
So there is no money for bread, again
& Its end of the month, again
& There’s no use looking for help from my friends
Because they are hustling to and are trying to pay the rent

Too many times
I wonder – when the heavens start to fall
Will I stand tall in my beliefs or
Will I find comfort and relief in declaring defeat?
Somehow, the ends of my mind do not seem to meet
& I’m caught in indecision –
caught in between my duty and my vision

But as the dawn announces the sun
My joy – no longer shackled &
My peace – no longer bound
dance together in celebration
for this new day that I have found
& I am reminded that I am
seeking an understanding of Self- That beautiful place –
suspended in the fabric of time
Where the Creator & the creation become one
& the dishonesty that plagues my reality
Dissipates in the light of this rising Son


WOMEN (this is for my sister – next movement)
By Winslow Schalkwyk

I see how strong women fall
Because of their love for a man
& How they are blinded by the devastation
That can be caused by one hand

This is for my sister
Who is bruised and broken –
Afraid to abandon her queen Dom
Because of her love for her king
She bleeds & cries helplessly
Unable to ask for help
Because her pride won’t let her be
She accepts her reality
Because she chose to love a broken man
Whose love only broke her
Whose love never gave her wings to elevate her over-standing
Whose love took her womanhood and suppressed her freedom
Now she hides
Hoping that her friends can not see her eyes
& Her brutalized spirit
That no longer wants to fly

This is for my friend
Whose life is lost in liquor drenched dreaming
She does this to anaesthetize herself to feeling
As she struggles to piece together her life and find meaning
In the Red wine stained haze her life has become
Sometimes, she struggles with her sanity
Searching for feeling even though she has voluntarily become numb
She struggles to say that on a beautiful summer’s day
A MAN CAME
Took her innocence and planted the seed of
Deception, dishonesty & distrust in her bosom
A seed that grows with every passing moment
This is for my friend
Who everyday is raped by memory
Who fails every time she tries to renew her life
Who fails every time she tries to re-claim her life
There is no need to reach for that knife
Hold on tight –
Even the wounded bird gets to take flight

I see you
STRONG black women
& I wonder why you are
Disrespected, subjugated and negated
Why are you not exalted respected and exalted?
& I wonder how a tribe
That stands for the abuse of its womb
The abuse of its earth
Still manages to thrive today
& I pray that we learn to forgive
So that God can elevate us to a higher place
I pray that we learn to respect each other
So that God can elevate us to a higher place
But mostly, I pray that we learn to love one another
So that God can elevate us to a higher place

2005 - Sibo Gabada

PLEASE NOTE: some poems have been published elsewhere. Where possible we acknowledge this.


LIBABENI LINGACHONI ILANGA!
By Sibongiseni Gabada

Libambe, libambe lingachoni ilanga…
…walibamba umama ilanga…

Mothers of the nation, sisters in faith,
Daughters of Africa, healers of pain
For every man acknowledge as a hero,
Stands behind him an unsung heroine

Bafazi of Africa libambeni lingachoni ilanga
Women warriors swimming towards the horizon
Burdened by their downfalls in society

Viciously fighting for equal rights, furious about
Domestic violence, women abuse an heated from
Their rejection in the community as a non- decision making gender
Subject to Aids stories, rape an poverty

They seemed determined to capture the sun before
It dropped into the deep ocean of life
I thought the sun went under, but I never heard it sizzle
I saw them disappear, but leave me they would never
They never did leave me; they were just ahead of me.

Libambe, libambe lingachoni ilanga…
…walibamba umama ilanga…

That’s when I realized that they never did leave me
They were not chasing the sun but merely pushing it
To make my tomorrows brighter
I watched them encourage each other regardless of race,
Ethnic or creed boundaries
From the unknown community heroines to the well known
Mothers of the corporate world, I saw them all push the sun

It became clear to me that non- conquer the beauty of an
African woman in her culture, society and community.

So celebrate women… black, white, coloured or Diaspora…
Celebrate women.

Libambe, libambe lingachoni ilanga…
…walibamba umama ilanga…

2005 - Primrose Mrwebi

PLEASE NOTE: some poems have been published elsewhere. Where possible we acknowledge this.


You love me!
By Primrose Mrwebi

This time,
it is an awkward intangible feeling,
Somehow uneasy,
Every time the words come out your
Mouth they touch something in me,
I ask myself how come now and why you?

Does it
matter where these words come from?
Should it?
Would these reactions be the same if the words
came from different well?
It feels exciting yet I cant help the
Apprehension that reminds me of my past,
The river of tears that took
So much from me, and the danger of affecting
The strengths of my character,
The little voice that reminds me that
He left,
so why do you want to stay,
That he lied
and why would you tell the truth,
and that these thoughts
Made me cry, and you would make
Me cry even more,

That moment in my life made me drown
With hurt and a lot of, almost unforgettable
Pain that twisted my mind and offered me
Uncompromising cynicism

All of this and much more
Makes me seek more ways to hide behind my smile
And perhaps even my confidence and spent
More time in things that give me the
Ultimate power, things that are
Tangible and real, things that
Are rather black and white like the
Colour of simplicity and just enough
Warmth, but nothing that pierces through
Nothing that breaks the layers
Of protection that remove
My heart away from
“ the love expose”
The foolish & hopeless romantic that exists in me
The one I conditioned and kept at bay
Each time she wanted to rise
I told her “ Stay, stay there its better that way”,
I convinced her that pretty and colourful thing could replace her

You have found her she is here with you,
But still I would like to know why you and why now,
Should these questions be serving as answers to the
Unspoken longings, I pined for you though
I did not know you; I asked if I could meet you
And your arrival is as much a question as
Why you are here, to question me
And unveil the mask of the romantic,
Carefree me that has been kept at bay for
Long while,
And that the little girl still exists
And that tears do stream down my face
Whether I resist being weak and fragile
And that joy is created by another

Even though you do not have all the answers
You still make me smile, you dare to live
And love even though love hurts
You are not afraid of saying these words
You love me!

2005 - Lynne Harris

PLEASE NOTE: some poems have been published elsewhere. Where possible we acknowledge this.


THE END
By Lynne Harris

You come from the wings of a dark stage
Where neverworlds and nightmares hide, beyond
My sight and understanding, but still rage
Burns when I see some sad truth behind your eyes,
Past lies, and all the writing on this page.

I feel strange. As though I am inside,
Or side by side an unfamiliar me.
The edge has gone from my highs and lows. I cried
Once, over you. Glad tears often. It was
Your lightness that moved me then, and pride.

The substance has gone, only shadows remain.
But in the echo-ing silence of yesterday’s asking
And seeking and searching…the old refrain,
A semblance of wisdom comes back to me.
It is not in my hands to bear, or to end your pain.

2005 - Lucille Greeff

PLEASE NOTE: some poems have been published elsewhere. Where possible we acknowledge this.


Eucalyptus Witch
By Lucille Greeff

The virago stretches herself tall
towards the sky.
Her stature like the majestic
Mountain Ash knows no match;
a defiant pride manifested in
the singularly independent
way her shoulder blades
are always reaching for each other.

She labels her emotions
like the potions and plants
that line her vaulted walls:
anger comes with ‘righteousness’,
grief carries the burden
of the ‘universal feminine’,
joy, a ‘personal indulgence’:
the pleasure of a clandestine kiss
that is dangerous to linger on…

Hope is called ‘the future’,
a river flowing out before her
on a path the Buddhists
would deny her access to
in favour of investment
in an illusive Now.
Nostalgia is a ‘dream’
of yesterday’s deficiency.
Jealousy, a hidden potent brew
she names ‘deformed’,
the secrets of hideously
gnarled and twisted limbs,
a tiny bottle inside her sullied chest.
It glares at her from the back
of every shelf
whenever she rearranges
the relationships between the
branded vials of her heart.

She mixes, moves and relocates
her stately undiluted passions
until, obsessed with some
meticulously ordered
sense of inner self
her skin,
neglected
as an outward whim,
starts to shed itself
around her feet.
A kindled heap of fuel
waiting
for the moled and moonless night,
waiting
for the inevitable sensation:
longing like a tiny unsuspecting spark
to flash bright golden, opened spell;
an ecstasy uncontained,
an inner order abandoned
as she dives into the lake
waiting,
patient gum tree oil
to burn
the eucalyptus witch
upon her self-created stake.

2005 - Ian Ndimande

PLEASE NOTE: some poems have been published elsewhere. Where possible we acknowledge this.


TAKE ME AND MAKE ME
By IS Ndimande

Take me and make me your prisoner
for your wish is my command.
Take me and make me your Guard
because no harm shall come to you.
So take me and make me.

Take me and make me your arms
to touch you in a very special way
Take me and make me your legs
to carry you wherever you want to go.
Should you ask me to jump
I won't ask how high
I'll just do it.
So take me and make me.

Take me and make me your eyes
to show you nature's beauty
and to lead you to the right direction.
Make me your eyes to see only me
Because you are all that I see.
Take me and make me.

Take me and make me your heart
to carry endless love and
spread it all around.
Make me your heart to love only me
because you are all that I love
so just take me and make me.

Take me and make me your mind
to fantasize, dream and think
of only me, for you are all
I'm dreaming of.
So just take me and make me.

Take me and make me everything you like
Take me and make me Everything you love
just take me for I don't want to be alone anymore

2005 - Ilana Slomowitz

PLEASE NOTE: some poems have been published elsewhere. Where possible we acknowledge this.


On Scarborough Beach
By Ilana Slomowitz

Pounding waves against the rocks,
White foamy froth-like shaving cream about is blown.
And the spray, like a shower gently drops.

Nostrils filled with pungent smell,
Left behind by high tide’s swell
Ropey seaweed lying bare
Black and wizen by the salt air.

Snake-like shapes in piles,
Strewn on talc-white beaches for miles and miles
Amongst the rocks gathered too
Muscle shells, purple and blue,
Mounds of them, all sizes split in two.
A crunching sound beneath one’s shoe

Looking up at cloud filled sky,
A flock of geese in unison fly by,
Sea gulls perched upon the rocks,
And close by lies one red sock

I turn and there before my eyes,
I stand in awe and great surprise
The MASTER ARTIST, has stroked so bold,
A perfect rainbow to behold

Brushed with brilliance across the sky
I stand quite still, I stop and sigh,
The wondrous image fills the eye.
I marvel at the fragmented light
Truly A most magnificent sight

2005 - Geoffrey Haresnape

PLEASE NOTE: some poems have been published elsewhere. Where possible we acknowledge this.


THE THREE SISTERS
an ecumenical ballad
By Geoffrey Haresnape

Both Gertrude and Priscilla were
Mass-goers day by day.
Their youngest sibling, Marianne,
had gone another way.

For Marianne had met a man
with big mustachios.
He said that Roman Catholics
were not the ones he chose.

The sisters had a lot to say
about her thing for Ed:
‘My girl, he is a Protestant.
Your head needs to be read.’

M would not listen to their fears
nor hear a word of blame.
It seems she was a dizzy moth
and Ed the candle flame.

He led her down an alien aisle,
before an alien priest.
Her sisters would not hear her vows,
nor join her wedding feast.

The couple soon set up a home
above the bridegroom’s store.
He had a busy grocery trade
with bins around the floor.

He cut his cheeses, bottled oil,
and weighed his sugar out.
He was a dab hand with a scoop,
unerring with a spout.

At night he climbed the wooden stair,
was always on the go
whether between his sheets on top,
or in his shop below.

Eleven children came his way
by patient Marianne;
Her flesh expanded, wrenched, and shrank,
as only woman’s can.

Gertrude and Cilla felt meanwhile
that they had been unfair;
there’s nothing like an infant’s smile
to clear a poisonous air.

With candles burning at her shrine,
they prayed the Queen of Heaven
to intercede to ease M’s pain
when each new child was given.

As aunties they were quick to help
with bootie and with sheet;
but Edward felt they interfered,
and told them so, in heat.

At last they sent their Monsignor
to see the poor, lost ma
and bring her back into the fold
if she’d not strayed too far.

The cleric mounted up M’s stair,
a spiritual go-getter;
until Ed gave him one black eye
to match his big biretta.

In 1914 Ed was quick
to flaunt the khaki look.
He spent the war in kitchen tents
as a regimental cook.

Brave Oliver, his first-born son,
did everything he could
to hide that he was under-age,
and fought at Delville Wood.

When news came back to Marianne
he’d made the sacrifice
pro patria and Empire too,
her spirit froze like ice.

The stricken mother was alone
to deal with such a care.
Her weeping for her broken boy
was a pietà there.

The Armistice brought Edward home
with colours on his chest.
To make his ample family grow
he did his level best.

Despite his many strait-laced ways
he was a lusty liver
and soon acquired five arrows more
to fill his crowded quiver.

In `32 this patriarch
had seizures of the brain.
He slumped against a flour bag
and did not move again.

His Marianne remained indoors
dressed in her widow’s weeds.
She thought about her former spouse
and pondered on his deeds.

Eventually she took to bed
a gentle, dying dove.
The cross-stitch text beside her door
said simply: `God is love.’

Both auntie Gert and auntie Cill
were firmly left alone,
for all their sister’s progeny
thought their religion wrong.

They kept on baking, bottling jam
to aid the Women’s Group;
and when the wind-swept winter came
were ready with their soup.

At every Mass they thought of Him
who filled them from above;
their labour in the sacristy
was long, yet urged by love.

One Pentecost, the Monsignor
observing all their ways,
informed his bishop that these two
deserved some special praise.

The loyal pair were ageing fast
and each could hardly cope
but, in the nick of time, received
a medal from the Pope.

Gertrude expired in `53
when an infection spread;
and Cilla died from burns sustained
while smoking in her bed.

This ballad pleads with you, dear Lord,
who was a mother’s son
but also came to find a rock
to found the faith upon.

Can all three have their mansions
in that great house you plan:
two maiden aunts who served their Church,
one wife who backed her man?

2005 - Freda Freeman

PLEASE NOTE: some poems have been published elsewhere. Where possible we acknowledge this.


DEAR TEACHER
By Freda Freeman

Do not despair, when teaching
lessons in the open air
to wriggling children
waiting to escape at break,
for fizzy drinks and fancy foods
invented by the Devil.

Your pupils all grow up,
and one day far away,
when they chance to find
a pale pink oxalis nestled
in the grass, a slender tadpole
swimming in the stream,
or a spotted toadstool
squatting in the forest,
they will remember
the red-haired lady,
who opened their unwilling eyes,
forcing them to see
the treasures of Botany.


CHILDBIRTH
By Freda Freeman

The world retreated
in a blue haze of pain.
(How could Dante forget
to make mention of this?)

One came unprepared
for the savage intensity,
but then it matched perfectly,
in all dimensions,
the importance of the event.

No other preceding it,
No other after it,
was ever as moving.
A mother like millions of others
since Eve left the garden.
But I feel euphoric,
high up in the clouds
as if only I, only I
had a daughter tonight.

2005 - HA Hodge

PLEASE NOTE: some poems have been published elsewhere. Where possible we acknowledge this.


Graceless
By HA Hodge

From the beginning, in suckled infancy
of dream, when I knew neither you
nor the secret you will reveal,
but knew, as if of a state of grace,
of a perfect pool
welling out of blue mountains
holding me in its embrace.

Longing comes secretly (Gorecki’s 3rd).
Song infusing me until,
as melody lifts, I see.
And where was discord, light,
beyond lines of surf,
beats on shores of old dismays.
Now its beauty incises.

By night listening, voices
as moonlit stars drift
through hope. As if no epoch,
no geography stands watch.
And whatever I do -
bent to storm and cold night -
that love breaks.


Lion’s Head Blue
By HA Hodge

Below, the blueberry sea, the island
imprisoned in the bay ever hopeful.
Above, the eye-blue sky, the goddess manned
and measured by desire ever sensual.

And here? Here I sit on my sandstone rock
as if riding a lion by his mane.
And I see and I hear rushing surf shock
the shore. And does she remember my name?

Or the mountain she wears, always as blue
as her eyes, mystical, mysterious, bright.
I pray to her here, as if she were you,
ask her to grace me, and hold me tonight.

Then you call. As I know you always do.
We speak in tongues of love. Understand too.


[A white scar of surf]
By HA Hodge

A white scar of surf divides Africa
and Atlantic peopled by long fingered
kelp sighing with the surge. (The granite faced
lion shows a drying cormorant.) Higher,
beyond the mark of tide and time, small dogs
and women on long leads promenade the front.
Their senses tuned, as if by accident,
engaged by the sweaty man as he jogs.
Above, the voyeur of the apartment
block, in his indentured view a savant
of good taste, considers the abundant
flesh to feed his appetite – so, content.
Beyond, the ancient mountain has seen it
all, is not moved, and does not care a bit.


Then the music
By HA Hodge

Then the music. A single note touches
my temple and holds me. I see
light here and shadow beyond
an ancient time where
stones of fire ring my hands.
There the taste of you cracks
an eggshell air – that fractured calm,
that moment, that endless movement,
timeless as the breathing sea
and the waters of the moons
of Cancer. I am nowhere. A gate
closes. The garden opens and the earth
lifts me. I touch your face
with eyes of infinite
blindness. As if you are
of the galaxies and this night.
All I am is not me. All
I bear are traces of an ancient
path. I take one step and listen
to the silence of your heart.


For Tatu
By HA Hodge

And here confusion. The painted
peach, an icon of nature matured in oil
and steel as if rain were falling
in vats steeped against the hill
and vines. Crystal fruit,
baskets of bougainvillea and breaded
brie chosen by the oddity of painter
and piano. Who could write
with empty head and eyes
of light and love
the odour of her body?


last poem for you
By HA Hodge

you sent me the saddest lines that I save
of poetry, mountain, your deep blue cave

although the blood and salt on those wet lips
recalls both blueberry sea and small ships

but no thatched cottage invited me home
rather its master, a dog and her bone

are more welcome than me at this front door
that is a barrier and threshold no more

I would have waited at doom's scarlet edge
by the black lake and the loitering sedge

if you had not seen me with your blue eyes,
refused my hand, chosen sham, shunned sunrise

I suppose the oracle was right who said
you would never leave your comfortable bed


People's Assembly
By HA Hodge

Fifty years ago this day I was barely nine,
snotty as any boy playing in the garden
of his childhood. All the world was event,
as it remains, but I knew none of it.

I knew freedom, but not of it. I knew
peace, but played at war. My hunger
leaned on a full belly, and I drank
in the universe. The stars knew me.

Children are our prayers given life.
How much our ancestors suffered
for us, the children of their faith.
What sacrifice of blood and deed

bled on the pavements of poverty
in the simple heroics of living the truth
on the battlefield of fear.
Hate is a savage emotion. It kills

without reason. Murder, suicide, family
killings, faction fighting, civil war.
Yes, mothers and children come within
hate's compass. It has no morality.

Nine years later, a young man, I stood
here in Saldanha, at this very place.
In the service of the state of hate,
of fear, of arrogance, of ignorance.

Uniformed in my understanding, narrowed
to vision so petty, so near-sighted.
I was the prisoner who shackled himself
and swallowed the key. Then begged freedom.

Freedom is not a place. You can be imprisoned
in a palace, in the mountains, in your mind.
Free, in a prison cell. Philosophers know
the key - love unlocks all doors.

I read the Freedom Charter yesterday.
Who wrote with such compassion? Who
opened her heart? Who forgave his enemy?
What does it mean to ask for peace?

These are not terms of surrender.
These are the embraces, the tears,
of brothers and sisters who wish joy
and happiness. Who love other people.

Are there men and women who fear
freedom? Yes, there are. We all do.
For with freedom come many challenges.
The charter seeks to share those burdens

within the law where the hands of democracy
lift the veil of fear and hatred
to reveal forgiveness, compassion,
and the love that surpasses human understanding.

Let me thank those brave people
who sacrificed so much so often
to enable us to stand together today
alive, and happy to be here.


Herring Gulls
By HA Hodge

They wheel and scream around the block like cogs
that knit and lock one disconnected flight,
yet tied to earth and death as much as dogs
whose masters give titbits, or say they might.

They shit where they please as much as those dogs
whose owners now scoop, or pretend they're trees.
I see them as beautiful demagogues,
which they're not, who will fall like autumn leaves.

The herring gulls pivot in dialogue.
Do dispute, rancour, unrelenting shrieks
belie their singular grey monologue
of flight, the cutting-edge of yellow beaks?

A billion years of surf dispute this reef,
both herring gull, and man, without relief.


Words of Water
By HA Hodge

A poet spoke the first word,
and the word was good.
He was well-pleased.
She spoke the second word and, quickly,
the third. And the words were good.
He was well-pleased.
Soon followed the fourth word,
the fifth, and the heavens opened,
words fell like rain,
like the voice of God.
He was well-pleased.

Puddles of words formed,
sought each other in dialogue,
formed little streams of words,
dammed in conversations.
He was well-pleased.
A river formed from words,
fell headlong over a cliff
of adjectives into a lake
of reflection and meditation.
He was well-pleased.

There, tadpoles wriggled like verbs
and the fish breathed words.
All the words that ever were,
were in that lake.
He was well-pleased.
The lake overflowed with words.
A new river formed and tumbled
over the cataracts of meaning,
passed the plains of grammar.
He was well-pleased.

So it was all words come to the sea
and are there still.
The poet gives none new.
He is well-pleased.
Now, words blow from the sea
like leaves in autumn,
and the poet sees them return
and uses words to cleanse her thoughts.
He is well-pleased.

Or, in the late night when the words
are frozen to the pane of her view,
the poet takes a glass,
lets words quench her throat.
He is well-pleased.
The poet uses the words given,
re-uses them, the same words.
For all words are as old
as the day the poet first spoke.
He is well-pleased.

Even the poet's tears are words
that return to the sea.
And as she weeps words
seep into the soil,
collect wisdom there.
He is well-pleased.
This is the truth of the poet.
She alone knows the taste
of words.

2005 - Chris Thurman

PLEASE NOTE: some poems have been published elsewhere. Where possible we acknowledge this.


BOOTS: A FRONTLINE REVERY
By Chris Thurman

From under how many inadequate superfluous blankets
on how many casualty trucks heavily loaded
have how many dead soldiers’ rottentender feet
sun-starved crept pale-soled into the too-late thawing air? –
I wonder.

The amateur historian newsfools’ photographs
will proclaim with indifferent black and white frankness
that dead mean need no boots.
They shall not grow old, etc
nor cold in winter, nor bruised on summer’s sharp gravel
but the living do, and will
and must be shod before we die
So: a necessary transaction.

What dead men’s boots do I wear?
The rough leather and split heels
declare other owners, the taught-strung laces
easily snapped squeak the mud, snow and baking heat
of a thousand miles already walked.
And so I walk.

Will these boots survive me? I pledge them
to no other. I curse
the hand that tugs them from my day-old battle-torn
corpse. My feet will not suffer the indignity.

But if you must,
unknown soldier, carry forward my war-weary motion
and if you will be given my rifle
and if you, too, will soon be killed
then I entrust
these immortal lifeless trudging vessels
to you:
wishing a speedy end
to soldiers’ recycled boots.

2005 - Annabelle Wienand

PLEASE NOTE: some poems have been published elsewhere. Where possible we acknowledge this.


All afternoon
By Annabelle Wienand

All afternoon I lay flat borrowed clothes
cut out patterns
from the week’s newspapers.
Apart from headlines
photographs in city morgues
confirm that people have died.
Reading the fine print
near a future side seam
I am corrected.
These covered bodies lie in Iraq
while others die in London.
Here in this city still more
flat line in riots
bus accidents and taxi wars.
A bleep for each ending.
A fine red dot marking the spot
until the lines I describe
cut out and pin
begin to overlap.
Hot spots glow on the world map
like cities seen from space.
The lights merge
in a blur of human loss.
All afternoon I lay flat
borrowed lives
cut out from the week’s news.

2005 - Aneta Shaw

PLEASE NOTE: some poems have been published elsewhere. Where possible we acknowledge this.


Aanhou-rek-siesa
Deur Aneta Shaw

Jy is ‘n moordenaar
jy steel die lewe
uit iemand se lyf uit
iemand in my hart

Met jou ysterkloue
om haar hakkelende hart
en kruipende tentakels
wat verdrinkte niere omvou

Mond geseël
teen lewensbrood
maak van haar maag
‘n uitgeholde gat

jy steel haar vrouwees
warm kontoere lank verdwene
nie ‘n vetselletjie los jy
geen kussing vir brosse boudbene

jy’t haar brein oorgevat
sy kyk deur jou oë
sien in die spieël
‘n vetgat met dik boarms en bene

jy maak haar lieg en bedrieg
vreet haar laaste kragte op
sy bly jou trouste dissipel
aanbid haar gulsige heer en meester

aanhou-rek-siesa
jy verdien haar nie

2005 - Tania van Schalkwyk

PLEASE NOTE: some poems have been published elsewhere. Where possible we acknowledge this.


Fresco
By Tania van Schalkwyk

The sky said wait.
Normally fierce blue and hot with a big round sun-
this morning it was the grey silk lining of a kimono,
swishing past the edge of a door -
the wing of a humming bird brought still
and spread out to its complete span behind the glass of a museum wall.
It hung like a painting.
And breathed like a flamenco dancer waiting to hear the singer’s call.

There was no mist. Everything was clear.

Beneath the fresco there were no
gilded ornaments, nor towers of frankincense and myrrh. No chants.
Only the sound of faraway wind arching believers to their knees-
building cathedrals with their bodies in the clouds
and mosques with their minds .
The temples of last night’s dreams floated through air to meet the rising sea.
Salt could be smelt everywhere,
embalming the land
in preparation for its role as tomb.
The sky was a magic prayer carpet
hovering before the tale to be told had begun.
It was the time of before.

First published by Triplopia


There is Beauty in this world
By Tania van Schalkwyk

“Beauty will save the world”- Dostoevsky

There is Beauty in this world.

Red poppies
beside a car dusted hi-way,
profuse amongst rubbish,

they scintillate-
flamenco dancers in Speed’s wind.

Or, the silver tinsel
of a take-away waffle’s stuck-on foil
in barely there sunlight-

underwear
melted into flesh. Hot,
against a ready mouth.

First published in Unlikely 2.0

2005 - Sandy Wetton

PLEASE NOTE: some poems have been published elsewhere. Where possible we acknowledge this.


BEREFT
By sandy Wetton

Bereft, was a word that held no special meaning,
‘till you left.
‘till your insubstantial self,
drifted from the urn,
to mingle with the foam
of the steel gray channel
on that most un-spring like
April afternoon.
And suddenly, bereft
rhymed resoundingly with death.
And came to signify
a state of mind, a void, a huge and gaping,
unplugged hole from which my spirit leaks.
Rolling tear like down the cheeks of my confidence,
spreading over the surface of my life
robbing my stride of certainty,
my eyes of clarity and my mind of reason.
Leaving me regularly in conversation
with your memory.
Choosing to forget that you have left
while I remain, bereft.


Haiku for Martin
By Sandy Wetton

When you died you took
All my pre-sleep fantasies
All my waking dreams.


With you I shed all.
Inhibitions and French lace
Joyously naked.


The wind is howling.
Scooping salt tears from the sea,
mirroring my mind.

You grow out of it.
The putting-on of someone.
You loose the habit.


MY VALENTINE
By Sandy Wetton

I do not want you for my Valentine.
It smacks too much of the temporal and the temporary.
If you would come into my heart, I bid you tarry,
long after the fourteenth of February.
I do not want your candies, cards and flowers
but your time in years, not fleeting hours.
Not passing passion, storybook romance
but steadfastness, fidelity, constance.

I will not celebrate one day with you
set it aside and mark it with some token
of a sentiment that’s rarely spoken of,
except in fractured terms. Broken attention
distracted by the need for novelty.
But share with confidence the everyday,
familiar comfort of the commonplace
activities of life, in mutual space.

I do not want to hear you speak of love
because this day dictates you must remember
more vividly than April or November
to fan flames from some dying ember.
Long lost lust, forlorn, forgotten dream
of how love might have been, or should be seen
to be, in pursuit of a pretty parody
of the plain and simple reality.

I do not want you for my Valentine
But need to know as youth fades, beauty’s tarnished;
As I rage ‘gainst old age, ideals vanquished.
Hopes, dreams and life long friends perished.
The constant in my changing universe,
in sickness, health, for better or for worse,
true to your vow to be forever mine,
is you, whom I shall call, my valentine.


Late love
By Sandy Wetton

I miss you beyond imagining.
Not so much for the empty space
the cold forbidding place
on the other side of my bed.
But for what goes on now,
only in my head.
As I rage internally against
injustice,
as I assuage my angst,
in poetry.
You, who spent your life
close to the soil,
who from the Kalahari to Sudan
taught your fellow man,
how to get the best from earth
where, there is a dearth
of rain.
You, who had not a racial bone
in your slim athletic frame
are gone.
I have no one to talk with now
of the wicked ways of power
the weasel words of media,
and at the witching hour,
cry.
“When ends this pain?”


Media Myopia
By Sandy Wetton

The thirty second sound bite shifts
the listless listeners attention
from the crushing news
of the hapless victims trapped in China’s mines;
to the overloaded ferry
slipping silently beneath the holy waters,
consigning its cargo of humanity
to the gurgling Ganges;
to the latest in a long line
of boring Bagdad bombers.
While they drum their fingers
impatiently at these dull statistics.
Eager for their daily dose of
mindless titillation
of Pop Idols, soap opera
and reality television.


ODE TO EXCELLENCE (or “Hot Air on a G-String)
By Sandy Wetton

Your beauty and complexity lay me to waste.
Chaste purity of note brings tears to my eyes
and moments later has me sexually aroused
as your mood change sways me in your arms.
Then tenderly you bring me down
and fold me in a melody sublime,
while I, supine, drown in your loveliness.
Lulled by adagio’s sweet tones,
caressed by strings, stroked,
plucking at my soul.
I feel your sound and rhythm, intimately.
I reel with horror at the savagery
you stir in me. And yet delight in it.
Take flight in it, to other lands
painted for me with your imagery.
Transported physically with eyes wide shut
to golden eagle crags and landscape heather hued.
Oh yes, you colour my vision too.
Swept along with the great curve of your themes,
excited ever more by endless variation,
as movement after movement
builds a tsunami of sound,
a wrap around allegro energico
of passion too profound, to resist.
Bow kissed, and minor keyed
I crash with you through
the last crescendo of climatic cords

onto the barren beach of utter silence.
Overwhelmed by the emptiness.

Until, I catch in my mind’s ear
the haunting memory of ecstasy.

With thanks to Max Bruch for his Violin Concerto (#1 in G Minor Opus 46) and Scottish Fantasia.


ROE – Rules of Engagement
By Sandy Wetton

I give you little bits of me
small offerings of poetry
home grown greens and handmade soap.
I send you salutations on a card
I’ve crafted
with a photograph
I took.
Lend you a favorite book.
And this, is seems, is what we do.
And we should not misconstrue
these gestures.
These gentle minuets of minimal engagement,
these paltry, not even promises of possibilities
these passing, parsimonious acts of kindness
offering absolution of commitment.


STILL MOURNING YOU
By Sandy Wetton

There are still two things I cannot do
thirty months from loosing you.
I cannot read the poem I wrote
in eulogy.
I cannot even quote
it with impunity
from tears.
I can speak of you with friends,
but those lines, in rhyme it seems
need more time.
And that is fine, I’m
in no rush to share
away from the rarified air
of the funerary circle
the pyrrhic victory of having the last word.

The second thing is harder, I’ve not heard
those deep bowed tones we halloed,
notes Elgar exquisitely celloed,
since they cresendoed as your coffin
crossed the crematory curtain.
I reach for it and hear it in my head.
My fingers brush the case and race
away to choose a less contentious tune.
It hurts because I miss its haunting beauty,
Its achingly lovely, lyrical lilt.
Its melody had always rent my heart,
Hearing it now would tear me apart.


The secrets of Sua
By Sandy Wetton

Come, I want to show you marvels of nature and history.
A study in silence and a cacophony of ologies.
We must head North and North again
to the land of the Bamangwato.
To Northern Botswana’s great grass plain
and the unremarkable village of Mosu.
It is here in Mosu that the magic begins.

Mosu, hidden jewel of an African oasis,
With complex clues in its synthesis
of gushing spring water under tall palms
and the village nestled in the arms
of a towering escarpment.
Clues in the rolled pebble layers,
here, at nine hundred meters,
here higher and there higher still.
Stratum of fossil beaches slice the cliff.

Close your eyes. Do you not get a whiff
of waves, salt laden? Open your ears.
Is that the wind in the palms you hear?
or the sound of sea crashing precipitous shores?
Southern most shores of a once great lake.
Greater than Lake Victoria, this place,
visible a hundred kilometers in space,
once welcomed of the waters of the mighty Zambezi,
the Okavango and the Chobe.
Once upon a five hundred thousand year old past
this dust dry pan was a lake so saline and vast
it could have been a sea, this Great Makgadikgadi.

Sua Pan, by its southeastern shore, shelters
an island of peerless beauty, Kukonje hovers
in the heat haze, hospitable, beckoning
across the narrow channel, rewarding
the traveler with breathtaking views.
A kaleidoscope of ever changing hues
of muted pastel shades as sun paints pan.
And evidence of early man
is manifest in several Stone Age sites.

2.

Then North and West to where Kubu’s promontory,
stands, stark in the blinding, endless, infinity
of shimmering whiteness. Bouldered beachhead,
fortified with dry-stone walls, buttressed
by Baobabs, ancient and grotesque. Cloaked
in mystery, in an atmosphere choked
by the imminent possibility of discovery
of hand crafted bone fish hooks. Of discovery
of self at one with, in harmony with……..

You have to understand, this is the ‘empty quarter’
devoid of life and sound, devoid of water.
I used to come with dogs and books and wine
to drink in the solitude and label “mine”
the great expanse of emptiness. Renew affinity
with my own unique and particular deity.
This is the legacy that a strange geology bequeaths
to those with the stomach to face nature and their Gods alone.


TROPHY
By Sandy Wetton

At Shoshong, Modise and I chat.
Backs to the sun warmed compound wall,
sharing a pipe and the “this” and “that”
of the village rumour mill.
I from the Molopoe, your scent gone cold,
on a whisper of an uncertain sighting
by a herd boy, ten years old,
down in the Shoshong gorge by Livingstone’s spring
where the mission ruins stand, foundation high.

It is the legacy of legend, that stories will be told.
the hunter and the hunted, now grown old.
The fable of the first, fleeting, meeting.
You, already colossal, hung with the weight
of a thousand piano keys and mantle ornaments.
You, already committed to avoiding the plight
of poached ancestors, and I, unarmed.
Together we fed the fireside fantasies,
shadow boxing across the Kalahari,
Ngamiland, Makadikadi.
Mandated boarders repudiated
in an obsessive ritual of hide and find.

*****

Acacia trees, flat topped, sporting sun bleached toothpick thorn,
limb and leaf ashen with pan salt silt and forlorn,
with the tatty drapery of abandoned nests, cower
in dry depressions under the merciless hours
of unremitting blue. Blue as deep and wide and high,
as the high velt dome of an African sky.
Blue with the silence of death. Still with the absence of breath,
of breeze to easy the heat haze miraging of the hunters gaze.

Ma Bête Gris, mon Eminence Noire,
aging pachyderm with unsettled score.
I will not find you on this dusty plain.
Seems, you have eluded me again.
The scarab scratches dried out spheres
of excrement, testament to your passage.
Your footfalls purposeful imprint appears
to leave me a cryptic message.

2.

Tomorrow, I will follow, North to Nata,
to the river’s few remaining pools,
where spooked cattle will scatter
while you foul their water and makes fools
of farmers. Gone before their guns are loaded.
Tonight I will lie under a brilliant firmament
and dream of an ancient myth exploded,
of finding you and contentment.

They spoke of you at Nata, Gweta,
Makalamabedi, Pandamatenga.
Could you have gone so far?
Bush telegraph rushes rumour
of someone who knows someone
who thought they saw your spore.

Where have you gone? Where would I go?
Old now, lame and slow.
To water, yes, but where and by what route?
Lake Dow’s long dry, Mopipi populous,
South to Deception and the safety of the San
or North to Baynes Baobab’s and Nxai Pan?
Some much loved venue with a secret source.
Linyanti or the Savuti Marsh?

Phoenix Reclinata shades my contemplation.
I worry vegetable ivory in my palm.
I chew Mophane leaves to aid my concentration
and finger a lucky bean necklace charm.
The revelation is sudden and complete.
With compelling clarity, I know your retreat.
Haven of refuge, spiritual peace, asylum,
Temple, gallery, burial place and home.

*****

Alchemist have wrought magic on the landscape,
casting each breeze-blown blade of grass in gold leaf.
The slanting light of early evening escapes a gap.
The towering cloud bank begins to blush
at being caught red-handed, in the act,
of manufacturing a summer storm.
You can smell it in the air
as your delicate truck snatches passing scents
and catches mine.
3.
Tsodilo, an enigma wrapped in micaceous quartzite schists
catching the light and throwing the colours back.
Clothed in the painted dreams of long dead artists.
(you are honored often on their gallery walls)
Godhead symbol of the united sexes, Isis and Osiris,
the male and female hills rise from the desert floor
cradling the source of life in secret places,
perennial springs of sweetest water.

Ruminating, marula fruit and memories,
half hidden in the dappled foliage
making the smallest of movements,
the faintest of sounds, almost invisible
for all your size. I manoeuvre imperceptibly
for a better sighting.

I asked a Hambukush, who had not seen you,
down in his village by the Male hill.
But the descendants of the temple decorators knew,
stringing ostrich-egg shell beads, fashioning
dance rattles with cocoon of lunar moth, they knew.
They knew the inescapable inevitabillity
and did not laugh at my insanity.
For thirty thousand years they have served here,
they understand a pilgrimage, respect prayer,
know of the need for sacrifice.

I resist the urge to swat the Tsetse, biting behind my knee.
Prone, face down in the sand, I know you see me.
I see you too Nkose, as the sun slants now under a branch.
I see the fine tracery of each line and fold of your hide,
see the scars of old wounds, born with noble pride.
The great ears, gently moving air, the sparse tail hair,
the cruelly cracked toes and beneath your eyes
a runnel of rheumy tears. I see you Nkose.
Propped on my elbows, I close one eye,
focus and gently squeeze the shutter button.


VALENTINE’S DAY
By Sandy Wetton

I am bid, “Write of love.”
The sentimental kind
you are inclined to find
celebrated with wine
and fine
long stemmed roses
on Valentine’s.
Evident too
in those who,
would woo you
with heart shape packaged
praline or soft centres
in smooth chocolate.
A date decorated
with red ribbons,
redolent with promise,
blind with bliss,
expectant of kisses
and small, hard, well cut stones.
But when the day is done
the romance gone
the thrills live on still
for those whose tills
cash registered the
cost of your courtship.

2005 - Patricia Schonstein

PLEASE NOTE: some poems have been published elsewhere. Where possible we acknowledge this.


The fallen Christ figure
Mill Street intersection, Cape Town 2000
By Patricia Schonstein

The figure lies at the foot of the traffic lights
as though fallen from a cross.
The arms, as if once nailed out,
lie inwards, palms open, fingers outstretched.
The head has dropped backwards and the knotted hair
hangs matted with dirt and grime, though it could be blood.
The legs cross and the feet lie
seeming torn from a holding nail.
The garment is not a bloodied loin cloth
but a suit of abrasions without buttons.
A plastic begging cup and some spilt coins lie to the side.
The city rushes by.


Death at the side of the Great North Road
Zambia 2001
By Patricia Schonstein

Yes, I saw him die on the side of the road like a dog,
but worse than a dog.
He was just a bundle of bones in a bag
strewn across the gravel
with eyes turned up to the sky.
He had walked from the village
with a stick to help his weary legs
but he fell here
here near all this stinking rubbish:
tins and plastic and broken bottles.
The stick could not lift him;
the flies tormented him.

He had come to the market
to buy herbs which might heal him
and a small drink of milk
for his bleeding blistered stomach.
But his money was not enough,
those few coins – what could they buy, really?
The stick was useless for trade.
I could not wait nor watch the sky with him,
did not even wave the flies away,
but only whispered as I past,
some word of farewell,
out there in the burning hot sun



Sudanese genocide 2004
By Patricia Schonstein

It is said of the Sudanese
that they keep urns outside their doors
filled with fresh water kept cool by the red earthenware,

and that any person passing by may drink
may enjoy the water’s goodness
may cool his brow against the terrible heat of the desert.

It is said that there is a new genocide
now sweeping like a storm of locusts
from the north across the south,

one which will surpass all those Africa has known;
one which will leave the urns smashed and the water spilt;
one which will make of the Rwandan massacre but a small hell.

2005 - Nadia Nel

PLEASE NOTE: some poems have been published elsewhere. Where possible we acknowledge this.


Ma
Deur Nadia Nel

hoe kon jy weet
toe jy die dag soos
'n oorryp vrug oopbars
onder die Desemberson
wat sou word van jou
bloederige bondeltjie

produk van jou hoop

hoe kon jy voorspel
dat die kind so ver van die boom sou val?
(jy't nog altyd verrassings gehaat)

en tog...
ek moet glimlag
want hier waar ek sit
(kaftan om my kniee gevou
ek deel 'n koppie
jasmyntee met my kat)
is die twee van ons
ek en jy
so eenders
dat ek nie eers 'n
poem
oor jou kan skryf nie.

2005 - Methuli Mbanjwa

PLEASE NOTE: some poems have been published elsewhere. Where possible we acknowledge this.


Perfect balance
By Methuli Mbanjwa

Turbulent flow of the wind causes stir on a free throw litter
This is life’s blow, is that why I’m bitter?
Fair is there, but still is a deceiver
Nothing is fair if you don’t have flair

Forget I said anything about bad environment
Remember, I once said something about background
A stand, knowledge… knowledge of oneself
Look around
Look further than that
You are bigger than that
You are deeper than the sea-bed level
Sure purer than the wind blown refuse
Manifest a dynamic stronghold
Be bold in a tight threshold
You will rapture limits with strong-will
You win!
You will not be deterred by the big puzzle

Vanished is the self-indulgence and gloom
See? Life is not ruined or doomed
It’s cool, no sweat
Look around
Look further than that
You are bigger than that
You are deeper than the sea-bed level


The only thing you have to do is
Push…
Push hard till farts spark out.
Do you know anything about ‘tenacity on my shoulder’?
Push till you find a perfect balance while you are on your toes.


Rhythm
By Methuli Mbanjwa

The hands, the clap and the lap
It is not only in my imagination but also in my blood circulation.
It is powered by the heartbeat
Heartbeat, heartbeat

The repeated sounds that bring about the harmony
It is the rhythm
It is the rhythm that shakes all the beings of the mother-earth
That gives the courage to put your head up through the valley of death
It is the rhythm that gives the soul
the nourishment never to worry about wealth
Because the rhythm was created when man first landed a foot on this earth

The beat, the group and the dance
The drum, the head and the nod
It is the rhythm, isingqi

It is a way to show deep emotional feelings
Expression without violence
Free flow connection, no turbulence
Free of exhaustion, feel exuberance!
No commotion, only ambience
Energy!!
The natural energy that builds up the spirit
The call that evokes traditional and cultural identity
The call to all Africans and to the world

The wood, the sticks and the hide
The palm of the hand beating repeatedly and skillfully
It is the rhythm

The pops, the booms and the taps
It is the rhythm
The rhythm of togetherness
The beat of co-existence
The sweet sounds of acceptance
It is the rhythm, isingqi!
It is the rhythm of love and unity


Short for words
By Methuli Mbanjwa

Your smile, my inspiration
What’s the description for beauty?
Oh sunshine!!
You mesmerise!
I see the jewel of the shrine

Your charm, irresistible
Is the brightness or the glitter of the magical eyes?
Your composure whispered to my ear ‘watch-out, she’s wise’

Your enthusiasm, girl you are fun!!
Charismatic, through your expressive eyes
Your soul distinctly speaks
‘Full of mystery’
You sure will make history


Your determination, newly revived courage
Well podded in vision and ambition
Your vivid expressiveness tells me
You are an African rose that blooms,
that shrubs through the rich dark soil
The soil like your chocolate brown skin

Your gentleness, draws me towards your warmth
Oh yeah! So sensual you caress
The depth of passion
The purest measure of a caring woman
Your humility and modesty, down to earth
You have earned my respect
My maximum RESPECT!!

2005 - Khadija Heeger

PLEASE NOTE: some poems have been published elsewhere. Where possible we acknowledge this.


Skin matters
By Khadija Heeger

I am captive in a mish mesh of skin
Tightened, held together by the infirmaties
Of skin intellect, skin wit, skin talk, skin designation
Skin fragmentation, skin degeneration
I am bound in the hue that makes you carve for me a
Personality, a mind, a heart, a disposition borne out of
Skin matters, skin deep.

My mouth explodes into justification, explanation, expletive
To remedy my taxonomy
I cannot speak into my feet, my voice remains stuck ,
Still angry sick, still choking on that designation, classification
Still finding as I sift through the debris more and more and more and more of me
Sore and so angry, sore and oh so angry
Sore and sore and sore and so much more
Of me to
Free
From
skin tyranny

my mouth swallowing words swallowing right
swallowing heart, swallowing hunger, swallowing womb, swallowing birth
swallowing feet, swallowing hands, swallowing tongue, swallowing blood, swallowing love
to make u safe in your autonomy

I am captive in the mish mesh of your mind
Sweating through the walls of your fear I will not live here.


[Untitled]
By Khadija Heeger

Khadija! Ja Allah
Khadija! Ja Allah
Khadija! Ja Allah

Some speak of women in Burkha, in Pharda with prison tongues and slashed clit and monitored movements and bound feet and voices that speak from the body and mouth of a man
Some speak of this and I too have seen
Some march in protest to save the freedom of these women in burkha and pharda with prison tongues and slashed clit and monitored movements and bound feet with voices that speak from the body and mouth of a man
And I march in protest with them
Some march and so have I
Some spit and splatter the manacles of Islam
Of Islam they say, muslim the embodiment of fanaticism, femicide of censorship and radicalism for evil
And I spit with them
I spit and I splatter and I writhe with exception

Some ask, why this door, why this path
Question my intelligence
Some still, dismiss me, call me mad
Say I have not thought clearly, need a crutch
will come to my senses in time
and I have said more, I have watered this illusion with my tongue
I have made my best effort to explain
To rationalise to them and myself
Why I am here in these shoes with that name
Why I carry the scar of the worlds disdain and the mirror of many muslim women’s pain
Why it is I came to this name?
The answer will always remain the same
Khadija! Ja Allah
Khadija! Ja Allah
Khadija! Ja Allah

2005 - Jacques Coetzee

PLEASE NOTE: some poems have been published elsewhere. Where possible we acknowledge this.

SHIPWRECK
By Jacques Coetzee

Today I assert nothing:
No thing obeys my call.
Today I am a shipwrecked sailor
Panting on a beach in blinding sunlight,
Bruised, battered, but alive:

I am the shipwrecked lover of the world
Panting naked the shores of wonder-

Without words, without a song to my name-

Only a steep dirt road before me,
And the thin rope of my astonishment.



MOSTLY WATER
By Jacques Coetzee

“We’re mostly water, not solid at all.”
That’s what the travelling man said to me
Lifting his full glass absent-mindedly.
“If you want to stay true to what you are,
Keep changing. Fixed opinions are the devil’s food.”

I turned to answer him, but he had gone,
Shifting shapes without a pause.
Stumbling outside into the pouring rain
I felt my bones dissolve, yet felt at home.

2005 - Gill Gimberg

PLEASE NOTE: some poems have been published elsewhere. Where possible we acknowledge this.


Bathroom schizophrenia
By Gill Gimberg

I experience a mini identity crisis
every time I brush my teeth
with the purple toothbrush which
stands stiffly on its single leg
in the glass on the bathroom
window-sill. The one which has
“Kathy” printed on it - very boldly -
in white. The one which stands
next to a similar toothbrush which
bears the name “Stuart” and
belongs to my husband.

Not one of my names is Kathy.
My husband’s only name is Robert.

In my son’s bathroom a blue
toothbrush has the name “Shannon”
tattooed, oh brazen creature,
down its shapely leg.
Even though there’s no Shannon
here either, except the toothbrush,
and that would hardly count
in a population census.
“Question 6: name, age and gender of all toothbrushes in home”
is not likely to appear on the official census form


No
By Gill Gimberg

So what we have here is whole household
of bathroom schizophrenics.
There’s no Kathy in our house,
no Shannon, no Stuart, with a ‘u’.
But there is a certain frugality,
an inheritance maybe from a distant Scottish
ancestry - not Stewart, but MacDonald,
which taught that a bargain is a bargain.

And, these toothbrushes were, after all,
being sold at half price.


Brighter than a thousand suns
By Gill Gimberg

Dying became you.

you did it so
completely lustily
threw all your weight behind it
your big frame rushing towards it
as though the cancer cells flowering
in the rivers of your blood
spiraled you inwards
faster and faster

oh, you did all the ‘right’ things
the tests, the scans,
the course of chemo
went through the motions
of wanting to live just a little longer
a game you played
for us
your friends,
your family

but you,
you hastened towards your death
like a child counting the number
of sleeps
to his birthday
or the holidays
or Christmas
your big day
couldn’t come soon enough
for you

Dying
did not scare you,
you so eager to look down death’s long tunnel

Tell me: did you see light there?
Was it brighter than a thousand suns?


Driving north
By Gill Gimberg

We have left the sea behind us now,
And the fertile green and gold of Citrusdal.
The last wide expanse of azure,
Cupped in its lush valley,
Has dwindled to a patchy river
Then slipped, silently, into the sand.

As though stranded in a time long past,
Our world has become a monochrome,
In shades of grey and sepia; the
Colourless names of the towns ghost by
At the sides of the broad charcoal band:
Vanrhynsdorp, Niewoudtville, Calvinia.

The only lake at Brandvlei is in the name.
Here all moisture has long ago been leached
From the sand, the rock, the scrubland.
The false brilliance of the petrol station
Gleams briefly, then disappears into the
Grey where horizon bleeds into bleached sky.

Dust devils prance and dance across the veld;
Fragile brown genies called up by the friction
Of wind and heat into fleeting manic life.
There is nothing here to cast shadows,
But the hollow skeletons of old windmills,
The empty shells of deserted farmhouses.

On the hot tarmac mirages shimmer like
Streaks of pigment in a half-developed
Photograph.
There is little traffic on this road,
Although it is a good road, going north,
Militarily wide and straight.

Then, suddenly, jewel-bright world
Of the Orange with its emerald
Lucerne fields, amethyst grapes
Crystallised on the vines,
Picket-fenced gardens of sapphire and ruby
And fruit trees’ golden gleam.

Here the town names have music in them:
Kenhardt, Keimoes, Kakamas.
We drive more slowly now,
Reluctant to leave this bright world;
This promise of prosperity, of plenty,
Carried in on the brown rush of the river.


Tyres whisper over the long bridge
Above benign water opaque and heavy with silt.
Before the year-end this river will claim
A father and son; fate-toppled.
But today there is nothing sinister - no threat
in this fecund world.

And still we drive northwards, away from
The river, life-giving, life-taking;
Enter a new world sculpted from dark rock
By the desert wind. Fired by the sun
The dry gullies reach into the hills like
Road cuttings - mysterious, inviting.

The only trace of our passing is the dust
Trail stitched into the white light behind us;
As ephemeral as
Karoo mirages
And irrigation droplets on
Fruit trees.

Briefly,
We leave behind
The erasable tracks of wheels
Pencilled in sand.


Rinkhals
By Gill Gimberg

you must have known we were there
the shuffle of boots, voices
you could have stayed
hidden
in your camouflage

instead
you came out into the open
drawn by the black thread
of your tongue
head discreetly lowered
in front of the splendid
discus of your hood
spread in
- wariness?
there was certainly no aggression
in your hesitant passing
the slow tug of your plumpness
through the grass

you took our breath away
with your beauty and composure

and I remember another
meeting
long ago
our son, not two yet
gleeful, naked
the border collies barking
and the rinkhals,
cornered
standing tall against
the wall of the house
with its great hood spread above the black vee
the slow sway of its body and the
glint of its dark eyes
watching
as we picked up the child
called off the dogs
backed away

the hood furling
the silent slipping away
into the bush
such patience
such tolerance

and I think how we are part of it all:

the beauty,
the ever-present danger

2005 - Dawn Garisch

PLEASE NOTE: some poems have been published elsewhere. Where possible we acknowledge this.


1982 - 2004
by Dawn Garisch

between the years the layers
between the layers of years you entered my life my lifetime
my life a tree of spring leaves
between the layered leaves you drew me
between chalkmarks and charcoal you drew me to you through you
you taught me how to enter love how to love how to love you
between the soft leaves of my sex unfolding you slid
the leaves of my heart valves skipping their beats
between the beat and the spurt and the slipstream of bloodties
you inserted yourself
my bloodknot untied and spliced to your life to you through you
through your side I sighed
my form unfolding origami
my form resolving to be true as steel as love
true to this story unfolding new as soft green leaves
between the sheets and scenes and stages
I entered with you
you taught me how to enter through you despite you
between the layers of my desire you taught me
to love your body my body
to lay my body down my life
blind inspired I slid inside our story
you taught me blindside how to love you more
to trust you to trust life that gave me two male children despite you
you taught me to shoulder blame
between the babes and timetables and weary nights
you taught me you would not leave me believe me bereave me
between the sheets between the beds we made
beds of spinach and the leavened loaves rising
the laundered sheets the mealtime tables
the years of our loving and our hating
between the spring and autumn of it all
you taught me to taper myself
my very footroot caught into the boulder of you
between loud stones the silent fissure of you holding what was true
what I thought was true
you taught me to be patient and tenacious and curious and kind
your acts of kindness left me
mindful and grateful

between promises and what transpired
between your random acts of kindness to others
between your other lovers
between your blindsided acts of kindness you left me
autumn layered leaves
trees barefingered pointing
between your intentions and your crimes of desire
you taught me about loss and leaving
leaves ungreening burning dropping
leaving trees barefingered grieving
unlearning lessons of spring receiving
seasons turning
trees unseaming
between layers of despair and believing
your absence taught me how writing can retrieve me
retrieve the scattered debris
laid out like death a poem a prophesy
my pen bleeding words
raking shattered words together new words seeding
sown into these leaves this leaving
these leaving trees laying down their lives for me for my life tree
paper reams sheaves of paper
teaching me to lay my life down
my very dreams inserting themselves
into these book marks these earth works
between the lines inscribed because of you
you taught me to unbind my life my love
to untwine my root from you
you taught me the difference between loving and lies
between the bed and the door
both made of trees laying down their lives
between seeing my life through your eye or through mine
between life lines and lies
you taught me not to believe your story about me
not to believe you to leave you
between these acts that line my life you taught me
not to love you
to leave you
you taught me how to leave.


CALL
by Dawn Garisch

Your tongue throws nets onto the air,
matrices of music inspired at Eden's breast.
They spill and fall into my dreaming ear.
You're very near;
my fish heart falters – which way, which way?
Magnets in your eyes disguise true north:
compass needles whirl
A harbour lies curled in your body's bay.

I turn away
lashed fast to the mast of feeling.
Into the gravid pitch and lunge
I tread the dance of uncertain waters
my face stinging salt wet.

And I wonder about
the give and slack of the empty net
against the full muscle of want
and the sound of a call that rolls and rolls
searching for its echo.


FAT MAN
by Dawn Garisch

I make love to the fat man
who has no fear,
I slide on his thighs,
his smile inside my sigh.

Life isn't pretty and he is not mine
but I have desire.

We ride and ride in the dreamtide
back to the oasis where life first began
when a woman dancing
seduced a man,
took his ambivalence astride,
impaled him on his lust for love and life.

His scream still sounds in my ear.


Drowning
by Dawn Garisch

The Chief Engineer is a handsome man.
He knows what it takes to make a ship
go. He controls
controls the engine,
he caresses the casings.
Like a farmer far from help he makes
he makes a plan.

At night we sleep
we sleep safe in our bunks, knowing:
the Chief Engineer and the Captain,
they know
they know where they’re going.

He leans forward slightly
whenever we speak.
The engine noise
noise during all the years
has damaged his reception.

The Chief Engineer has a land life
too: a fourbyfour,
a country house, a wife,
a wife and a Staffordshire puppy.

He buys me a drink
the night before we
before we dock, tells me
about his hernia op,
that cock size
size doesn’t matter,

also: that he loves
he loves his he loves
his wife. I see it coming:
he will offer me a life,
a lifeboat meanwhile,
meanwhile this man is drowning.

The Chief Engineer says he might need Viagra
or not. I am, after all, the ship’s doctor
and know what it takes
what it takes to make a man
go.

Carefully I explain
explain I’m divorcing a man
a man who dropped anchor
into a number
a number of women.

The Chief Engineer sails
he sails straight ahead,
he hasn’t heard any
anything, and offers me pleasure,
pleasure in exchange
in exchange for:
pleasure.

I laugh,
laugh without laughter,
go alone to my bunk
and cannot sleep cannot
sleep
because of my dream:

my dream of the Chief Engineer trying
to hoist his limp sail trying
to navigate his life trying

while out
in the bay out
of earshot
drowns his beautiful wife.


Love and Imagination
by Dawn Garisch

When my firstborn turned
eighteen
I gave him a rucksack
and imagined him into the world
without me.

He thanked me,
his mind and body already turned
away to other things.
I smiled at him and kissed him
and drove to my friend’s home
to unbind my grief.

Lament is a word I have come to know:
the sound you make aloud in a car
when you drive alone.

Without a word
my friend unbound my clothes from off my body,
ran a shower and tested the water
for me, and when it was just right, she
stood me in it that I might feel it
more: my hot loss leaving me; then

she took a rough cloth and scrubbed
my skin with it as though I were a horse
she loved; she scrubbed off the layers of the years
that I could get my body back, until my skin
began to sing again and burn, and still I wanted

more; again she stood me on the bathroom mat
and caressed my heaving body dry
that it might heal, even between my toes she towelled, even
between my legs she patted me gently dry; then

she soothed the oil of sesame into me, anointing
my aching body that it might live again,
even my ear lobes, even
my elbows, and then

she dressed me in her goddess dress
with pearls about my neck
and sat me down
and made me close my eyes then

slowly
very slowly
she fed me something sweet and nut like nougat
to help me imagine myself back into the world

without him.


Otherwoman (the letter bomb)
by Dawn Garisch

Dear Otherwoman,

(although I do not hold you
dear, your legs wrapped round
the man we share),
I recognise you:

Part of the truth of the lie of my life
we are joined by barbarous wire,
by pain and desire
by the need to believe in
our shared man’s smile.

You are spliced to my life
in so many guises.

Open as day
I approached you three times
and spread before you my intimate gains:
my children, my happiness, my life,
my pain. I explained each time:
the failure is not mine.
You are not the first, nor the last.
I asked you to relinquish your grasping grasp.
I failed I failed
I failed three times.

Our shared man smiled.

Under shelter of cockroach night
when husbands and their girlfriends lie
and conspire
I’ll wrap this letter round a brick
and penetrate your house with an orgasm of glass.

I hope your children get there first
to read about their mother:
desperate, needy, breaking
other women’s homes
as I am.

Once our man told me
in his dreams the two of us play
innocent as kittens
at his beneficent feet.
In my dreams, in front of horrified crowds,
the tigress turns on the tamer.

But now that it is over,
now I have stepped out of the ring of my enchantment
which after all was sawdust,
now that I have moved on,
tracking back alone through strange terrain recalling me,
releasing seasoned smells and solitary pleasures,
returning me to my original home,
now I’ll approach you one last time.

What if I could call you sister,
and together we could call him liar.
Over tea leaves round a fire
we will scheme and plot
to cut it off,
or necklace it
with a tiny burning tyre.

Prayer
by Dawn Garisch

The earth is a temple;
my body: a prayer walking.
My voice flexes on the wind in hymns of lament.

This pain across my neck my grandma gave me at my birth:
a perfect bag of seed her grandma gave her,
now rent through my own negligence.
the seeds shimmer like my tears down my breasts,
my belly, my sex,
through my toe furrows.
My heel plants them deep with every step,
deep like grief, like laughter,
deep into forgiving soil where now
my grandmothers lie.

What teeth they had are loosened, their jaws hang slack.
Their riddled tongues caress the seeds
remembering what they might have been and said,
lick, caress till they're watered and fed.
From these rooted beds
new shoots rend the ground:
songs to loosen the movements of my hipbones' circling sex,
prayers to stab my eyes open,
my heart offered like hands at prayer
my heart, my dancing hands
stanzas in the growing prayer for the world.

My head the overturned bowl of milk.
My shoulders light with feathers.
My sex the chalice from which I drink.



THE ELEMENTS
by Dawn Garisch

He wrestles with the elements
to make a good braai.

She in the kitchen
finds a green worm on
a lettuce leaf
and
trying to keep rational
flushes it down the toilet.

He showers alone nowadays
closes the glass sliding doors
stands encased in glass
imagines he is in the middle of a thunderstorm.

She walks in the garden
design in her mind
and a shopping list for the nursery.

In bed
she lets him cover her like a cloud
and is surprised each time
by feelings she doesn’t understand.


THE PROPER USE OF FLOWERS
by Dawn Garisch

I fall in love with men
who bring me
flowers picked from my own garden:

tossed salad bouquets
on fragrant platters
threaded vines all hung about like lights.

They stand expectant at my threshold
and point out things I've never noticed:

switchblade blooms that pierce the air with colour
brass ensembles setting fire to music.

My mother had a garden once
all hemmed about with jagged brick.
I remember
fitting foxgloves on my fingers:
a floral witch!
but then was scolded
and taught the proper use of flowers.

Now I sit, the books discarded,
worm my fingers into the earth's secret place
take root
and wait:
for those that come and show me to myself.

2005 - Akiedah Mohamed

PLEASE NOTE: some poems have been published elsewhere. Where possible we acknowledge this.

The Big Bang
by Akiedah Mohamed

Tears fell from a woman’s eyes
After she is bitten by a serpent
Tongue and heart coiled, her wound
Festers to the size of an apricot – grows bigger
And bigger…becomes a sweet melon…panic!

People notice, tempers flare
She is disgraced, shamed
Her tribe chain her with an anklet
Burdened by amulets; jingling – loose woman
Slut, no morals, no self-restraint
Weighed down by disappointment
Her watermelon belly keeps her buoyant enough to walk

Eight full moons circled the earth
Whilst life floats in a dreamy ocean of expectation
Faintly aware of the tug and pull of time
Advancing and receding

Then the Big Bang – an explosion
Where water, matter, air and fire are separated
And the fish inside the watermelon
Propelled liked a rocket, enters the earth’s atmosphere
Landing safely in the arms of a nurse
Who sewed up the torn petalled portal – to that world

When love bursts, the beginning is like that,
Filled with wrenching and releasing
A whole galaxy unfolding.

A secret belly dance unveiling the seven heavens
And amidst this explosion, each amulet is
Swung into the cosmic debris
The onyx eyes of her son shine
As she bends over to kiss him.

2005 - Gabeba Baderoon

PLEASE NOTE: some poems have been published elsewhere. Where possible we acknowledge this.


Cinnamon
by Gabeba Baderoon

I fall outside
the warm stole
of history.

Eyes run down my skin
like a single finger.

I find you

open as a tent.
You are cinnamon
curved around me.



War Triptych Silence, Glory, Love
by Gabeba Baderoon

I. Accounting

The mother asked to stay.
She looked at her silent child.

I was waiting for you.

The quiet of the girl’s face was a different quiet.
Her hands lay untouched by death.

The washer of bodies cut
away her long black dress.

Blue prayer beads fell
to the floor in a slow accounting.

The washer of bodies began to sing
a prayer to mothers and daughters.

The mother said,
who will wait for me.



II. Father Receives News His Son Died in the Intifada

When he heard the news, Mr Karim became silent.
He did not look at the cameras,
nor at the people who brought their grief.
He felt a hand slip from his hand,
a small unclasping,
and for that he refused the solace of glory.


III. Always For The First Time

We tell our stories of war like stories
of love, innocent as eggs.

But we will meet memory again
at the wall around our city,

always for the first time.