Chris Mann

Winter Fire, Spring Resurgence

Khaki hills, a long ragged line of red,

midwinter fire, making a meal of it,
munching through reedgrass, patches of shrub,
fixing its fangs in tree and thorn, its tongues
rasping the last glitter off rusty cars,

A hawk, its head tilted, hovers above;

a pair of brown-striped mice, like refugees
down burning streets, scurry before the tide,
the tall hot wave of appetite, that shimmers
and crinkles the air above, that shoots up

fern-ash feathers, the skeletal carbon

of leaf and twig, that rears up at the wind,
sputters out across rocks, becomes at night
a hundred red-eyed beasts, winking from logs
on behemoth-dark hills, on which the ash,
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a dry drizzle of talc-fine ash still falls.

The night is acrid, silent. The dawn reveals
on each blackened hillside, the pointed heads
of a hundred Easter Island statues,
termite mounds, sunk to their brows in neglect,

and round the stumps of aloes, rings of ash

like tiny cattle byres, plundered and burnt.
Slowly, three grey duiker, their fetlocks smudged
file down a sootblack hill silvered with frost
and sniff, like ghostly shapes in a negative

the pale pebbles, the charcoal shrubs of a dry stream.

And yet, inside the chrysalis, the outward ash
microscopic globules, like cells of dreams
divide and breed, strange porridges of things
minutely moist, nourish the pores of roots,
 and frogs and toads, hibernating in holes,
like pouches of bones, like monks, paunches shrunk
fasting for Lent, shift and speed a little
the slow suspended rhythm of their breathing.
Termites, in subterranean gardens

with silent stamina, like particles of hope

in darkness moisten their dusty seedbeds,
as spring, its catacombed marrows, saps, yolks
stubbornly bides its time. Then cloudgather,
rainburst, and release! The twigs unfurl small flags,

white bells and yellow trumpets line the paths,

goldbrown, gauzy shimmers of termites rise,
and each soot hill is nooked and crannied green.
Before the resurrection comes the lash,
before the spring, the quick chaotic fire.

The Drinkers

Tom Raath's the red-haired bloke lurching off for a pee.

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Craft welder, Makes wrought-iron gates and things.

That's his leather gloves, his black crash-helmet on the bar.
Muscleman over there's his nephew. Sells pumps and tractors.
His foot's in plaster. Got hammered in a serum last Saturday.
That's him, head back, glass raised, roaring with laughter.
Chappie Swart's the bald fellow swaying up to the dartboard.
Trains horses. The mermaid on his forearm's from navy days.
Boney Riekert chalking up the score's his biggest mate.
A shiftboss at the abattoir. Breeds bullterriers.
That's him, wiping his nose, giving the barmaid a stare.
And there's Koos Heap the owner belching out the Gents.
One hell of a bustling, chuckling, cursing old gasbag.
There he goes, tucking his belly in his khaki shorts.

Outside the rain has left puddles in the carpark.

A cat ghosts past a solitary, dark-windowed truck.
Sudden in the silence, a raw burst of laughter from the bar.
Shoof! it bursts up like a firework's golden shower.
Then silence again, the dark tall hugeness of the sky.

2
 Douglas Reid Skinner
An Elegy
Patricia Gertrude Reid (1919-1984)

The light at night from the streetlamp falls

through the window and onto the wall above
the bed where, alone, I have tried to imagine
what it feels like to die, remembering your
description of it - what you saw - when you
'died' one Thursday afternoon just before four -

'There was all this pain' in my chest and it was

so difficult to breathe, and the last thing
that I remember seeing was the nurse looking
anxiously down. And then I felt myself being
drawn up and in until I faced a grey wall - or
what seemed like a wall, with holes in it -

all the holes of the body I thought - but I

couldn't do anything, I couldn't control them -
and that was when I knew r had died (the time
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before I hadn't remembered, and only knew

because they told me after I'd been revived)
and then after what seemed like a long time

I felt myself being gently pulled back down

again, and that's when I woke with all those
tubes, and there you were, poor dear, looking
sad and worried, and we talked with our eyes' -
turning it over and over but never getting
any closer to understanding. 'It's not something

you can understand - it happens to you.'

Hourglass

'What is extraordinary is that a life should be

reducible to just so much grit' , the fine dust
carried away from the people and steep hill

3
 scattered all around by an offshore wind,
and the small, blue, odd-shaped bits of bone
that survive the flames hidden from the gaze

of mourners by a wall fall slowly to ground

through arcs of earth Iy equations to become
an indelible part of the eucalyptus and pines,

the mottled leaves and the worn, grey stones,

the landscape that changes with every footstep,
but continues} sustained in our ears and eyes.

A Postcard From The Other Side

In the picture Cupid reaches out

to embrace Psyche, his hands open
and his eyes closed, her arms folded
beneath her breasts, her gaze going

away and into the private distance

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of one discovered a moment too late.

The message reads, "Be patient. A
lifetime looked back on can only reveal

that understanding's approximation."

It rains purple blossoms on the grass
and the wind makes a soft world
briefly possible, quickly gone.

Beyond the roof and palm trees clouds

mass and burn in the setting sun;
in a maze of bushes red-wing starlings
scuff and kick for insed and worm.

Nursing old divisions and inhabiting

the gardens of spent passion,
a man sits alone and sings off-key,
observing the world growing dim.

4
 Don Maclennan
lotman} One April
Lotman, one April,
floating on the Dead Sea,
felt the grip of life
in that glyceriny water
saturated thick with salts.

To be thus on vacation
away from warring self
and warring nation,
was prelude to
a strange success.

That day he'd looked

into a hotel mirror
and thought he seemed younger.
Therapy had done some good.
Now, wearing shades,
and half afloat
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on a huge green mirror,

he stroked the surface,
looking for those yellow hills
raw and scratchy in the west
that yielded up the famous scrolls,
and wondered how his personal story
could be seen to fit
such manifest mythology.

One tale deserves another,

as a child its mother.
No need to be vexed:
the structure of life
is the structure
of the artistic text.
He floated potentially
famous and unvexed.

5
 Jenny Roberts

Just For Fun

There's something so engaging
about the copulating snail.
That knight and charger combination
in sombre suited mail.
They choose, with no discrimination
between he and she,
undistinguished partners
with carnal dignity.

There's no frantic casting of the shell

or baring pale behinds
in warm and rumpled lettuce beds,
or ecstasy of any kind.
Just a simple, side connection
with dart and line
winches in the conjugation
of gastropodic minds.
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Afoot, and side by side

in frozen concentration
these bowler-hatted lovers
conceive a future generation.
Then, with a bending of the eye
which one might well pretend
is a tremulous farewell,
they eat the bed on which they lie.

Wild Horses
My wild horses,
in summer's haze,
shimmer on far sands;
black hearts disguised,
bellies slack, satiated:
anonymous as rock
in a mirage of water.

6
 The languorous warmth
embalms movement, moment,
in the breathless hush
of a stopped clock.

They wait:
reeds whisper
at the wind's edge.
A stone splits.
A brittle tension
like ice
tightens si new;
the glazed eye shatters.
earth bleeds.
Beneath thundering hooves
the stifled plains
quicken and cry.

The Philistine

UWhat does it mean?" he asked,

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staring at the picture

on the gallery wall.

UNo recognisable shape,

a few lines taken to extreme,
all that violent colour. II

We shuffled catalogues
looking for the number.
'''Emergent Africa' it says."

He shrugged and moved on

muttering something
about modern art.

7
 Drunken Youth
The pavement slopes away,
rears up, slips aside:
a global difficulty
he takes at a run.
Leans on a wind
non-existent}
carefully side-stepping,
tricky, but still negotiable.
We laugh; coarse echoes
of a clear green ring.

An outraged harmony
humps up slight shoulders,
silk-fringed at the vulnerable nape.
Rank sweat beads
a milk-warm roundness
grown cold, obscene
in the uncontrollable vomiting stream.
The gutter cradles a crumpled
scarce-feathered thing.
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I watch, not knowing how

to wrap an aching womb
round my universal son.

8
 Peter Strauss
A Well-Perfected Time And Place

There was also the time he spent, a time between times

(Fleeing something, finding something), on a steep coast:
Unfurnished rooms in a run-down mansion pitched abreast
The ancient fishing-harbour, dilapidated rooms ...

A crowd of spoilt kid down-and-outers had been first; and on their

way
Had left whatever wreckage in theirwake they could - yet coming in
He found himself pronouncing the rooms good:
Grandstand view of the waterfront and then, behind,
The wide-outstretched, immaculate, the ever-unsullied bay.

And when he first moved in there where the pigs had been before
He traced the maelstrom of their crooked wake:
Figured and bent dark undertow and slick
From room to room
And kitchen to the outer door;
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He nosed it as a beast some other beast (that froze his diaphragm),

A salt dislike. And set to clearing the place up
By method, too far obsessed to make a stop
From task to task, driving the strewn rubble outwards from
His chosen stronghold, out and over to the chosen bluebeard room.

Then (into the night) scrubbed tiles around the kitchen sink,
Stowing the abandoned mouldy food
I n a black plastic bag. Good on good,
He thought, and felt his own world gathering there,
Meshing section to section, link by link.

And halfway through stood back, and took a pause

(Being older now, and wiser, than when
He'd last found himself doing this kind of thing); poured wine
Dark as the sea into a mug, unlatched the doors

The growing wind had stiffened, and-

Explicitly - toasted the harbour from his wood balcony:
It answered him with quiet - impersonally;
The boats' shapes (like cars brought to a stand

9
 In molten tar) moved hardly;
The water had just undersuck enough
To utter some anciently gruff
Though distant warning; the lights, unmoved in all this, seemed
friendly.

Yet swinging back, he found himself

Once more at work, and now
The urge was organization to stabilize the flow
Of his own circle of world: the shelf

With books, the table, chair -

The bed unrolled onto the floor ...
And now he finally desisted, went
This time to the outside door
(Which gave on to the flat's one narrow stair -

Its short and steep stair, hugging the wall) -

And now it rose fully to mind
How much this place was made already his private ground;
And listening to the exclamations of the gale,

He fantasized and knew (assuredly

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And let us say it now, not all was well with him)
How should some band of coastline drifters storm
His steps, that even weaponed he might kill, convincedly,

Defending the right to what he'd found:

That space-
That circle of swept boards - this place
Where after travels he'd gone to ground.

However, from the next morning his mind began to knot

Better relationships with what it saw -
And measure a sense of things, using a more
Evenly-tempered estimate;

Even coming down to the cobbled court

With the bright morning sunlight there
Things were better; the more so that at the foot of the opposing stair
A man was sitting: bearded, with mocking eyes, feeding
A prayer-meeting of cats leftovers of what he'd caught.

10
 And then there was a fitness about the way
The whitewashed ribbons of the walls that lined the stairs
Came down from one or other quarter with no calculable plan;
The cats prowling round about the feet of the man
Copied the pattern; that morning there was augury even in how the
fishbones lay.

*
The flat complex was labyrinthine, hiding in every nook
And cranny some further knot
Of inhabitants, or a solitary; its population
Unfathomable in the end, variegated by race, or ritual, or occupation.
So each time he came down the stairs he was the focus of some
newly-encountered but observant look:

He came to recognize the village idiot who would with infallible

gravity
Make his way up the street, a bottle under his arm,
Each day about that time when again
The sun's setting reflection spread
Its infinitely subtle charm
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To fill the eastern sky, the vanishing mountains, the solidifying sea.

Lived in the flats too somewhere. And the woman painter

With her genteel mother in the better rooms along the narrow
pavement;
His own neighbour, grieving for a lost lover,
Living under some strange enslavement
To her growing sons - he won her confidence, and often talked with
her.

•
Once, in wind that was blowing the air to a slicked luminosity
He motored out on impulse, drawn like a fish on a line
To where the anciently toppled giant's carcase trailed a cobbled
spine
For miles on end, and sank its broken coccyx finally into a cold-
shadowed sea.

11
 A strange trouble overcame him, as if
In walking he'd stumbled over a reptile's skeleton,
And had been caught, condemned to wind the thread of his path
between
Those tilted pyramids of spine, set squiff

By the unevenness of their basis, peaks

Discoloured with thin green - and he should be the wire
To link those sharp dolosse together! - led
Bya cold fire,
A fascinated meddling, to match up the breaks.

But when he reached the fina I rise, on foot,

Some kind of awe lifted his mood; he dreamed the burdensome
ocean
Had opened up to the root. Without motion
And yet the spot

Of unimaginable turbulence, a giant cleft

Stood out to sea. The raised waters, mountainous,
Held shape and never crumbled; only the douse
Of spray on water, and the calamitous drift
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Of sluicing foam could fill this hollow for him with the moil
And roaring which he knew was the reason of its form. And here
again
His tenuous mind was trapped in fascination: the pulsing chain
Of forces lacking outlet seemed a turmoil

Could only be of birth, as if the dreaming world had one more dream
in store,
Another earth to rise from the waters, metallic and sinister -

And what else might be the dim shadow of a globe emerging there,
Hardly visible in the waters' own shadowiness, metal~coloured and
gleaming, peering and retreating between
The taut arcs of the white waves' finely-twisted labia?

12
 Oh grace, grace, that after watching he could detach his fulfilled
mind
And turn again to where the good land,
Always, come south-east wind or stormy weather,
lifted her friendly lap, all fragrant with the sharp heather,
To the bright waters' uprush combing the sand.

He never realized how hard it came to grip him by the throat, his
temporary location;
He watched the street's life from his balcony - strange privilege,
For little was hidden there, and much of this world lived on the edge
Of shame or ruin - yet the gestures were large,
The moment diced for grandly. It was the courage,
So he decided, that conveyed to him a subtle part of undeniable
elation.

So he would stand with the hoarse music of the human beauty up

front,
While simultaneously the sinking sun behind the mountain would
reJieve
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The day of some of its burden, yet save

Enough light for a beauty that was slim and cleansing,
Jt was a difficult place to live, for him,
A place not welded to his life, a temporary thing;
Not one of his places, yet hard to leave .

..
But towards nightfall the rast evening his neighbour came:
Perhaps, he wondered later, to save him entering
Too lonely on the night's silence, and knowing
Too well for that time's good endurance what the bay had held for
him;

Came bearing gifts - to be shared between

The two of them alone, in a friendly intimacy:
A can of oysters, smuggled from next door carefully;
A knife for spreading; to clear the taste a bottle of white wine.

13
 And he found, in the stock that he'd let dwindle,
Soft butter, but enough; and stale white bread
(Right thing, by chance) for slicing from the loaf;
She'd brought the lemon, thank the lord the last essentiaL

And so they sat, like secret children,

Carefully guzzling the bread and oil -
Gluttons for the pool green on the dark oysters, pale
Yellow of cheap wine, the lemon sliced like a sun;

And her troubled eyes (but saying bishmila),

The rough voice moving in front of him-
The funny delicate greed for the food possessing the two of them-
These were taste and tinge and texture

For the flow of light in the room;

While outside the street got on with its usual nonsense,
The bay behind mixed colour to cheat nighes onset,
And the cup's content sank from the brim.

*
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So that when supper was over, he

Could savour his moment, his aloneness,
Taking his leave from the harbour
With dryness, containment, and even lightly.

14
 Basil du Toit
Sydney Bookman's Room
His room anglicised the African light,
to some extent even converted it
to Christianity. It knelt below
the windowsill where water ogled the stalks
of cut flowers, or devoted time
to reproduction Flemish paintings on the walls.
The texts we both studied
looked more difficult on his shelves.
But probably they weren't the same:
his carried the silt of better readings,
had traversed parts of brain I didn't have.
Music as old as madrigals
entwined male voices in a Philips mono
of reverberant quality.
He could extemporise a lucid commentary
while the music was tossing
his mind off
or irritating the nerve of tears.
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My round-shouldered speech
was slumped in a southern vernacular;
his voice sat bolt-upright
on perfectly circular vowels.
Even when he stretched it in laughter
like a pelican guffawing a fish
it never quite lost its disciplined rotundity.
Into his room I brought a mind
with the pages still uncut, emerged
broken-edged, fuller of bright words.
Others brought what he desired more.
It isn't nice to imagine the sudden, raw feet
touching in acts of buggery
muffled by a mattress on the floor.
And afterwards the furtive cleaning up,
the limp mattress lifted like a corpse onto the bed.
What I see is him knotted on a simple chair,
his brows gripping something,
as people, books and theories fall
into the jet-engine of his merciless mind.

15
 Vulture Ascending

With verminous black

banners unfurled
the bird-brute staggers
up into groggy air,
slowly waving the sleep
out of his wings.

Air pipes and passages

clear, asphyxia lifts,
he comes round from
the hypnosis of gravity.
A thermal draws him
back like a bow,

the small, narrow head

brims with sight,
alert for the rumpled, bone-
pierced carpet of a kill.
An eyebrow in the blue
almost completes the emptiness.
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Then the sky inhales him.

It seems to be over.
Trusting his premonitions
the wounded stop scavenging
for shelter. Blond humans
poisoned by heat

wobble into the open,

giving away what they're
not going to recover from.
None hears the closing
wings, the grim ahal
of sky expelling him.

16
 Beliefs
vir Helize

Somewhere on the cultivateable slopes

of mountainsides
or bounded within single valleys
there may be found colonies
of fragrant. bell·tinkling beliefs.
Beliefs ruthlessly dismantled
in the latest issues of science quarterlies
somewhere support homespun technologies.
Snug. agrarian ideas, like fellowship with trees.
are not keeping mum In a put-away brain
but are speakable, something to be lived by
or safely presumed
in dealing with obstreperous neighbours.
Faith abides in the rain-making
properties of the sooth-saying side of a hill,
in subsectional heresies. or animals
which have been struck off the official registers.
Localities adhere to non-physical physics.
there are irreducibly Chinese beliefs
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and in the ends of the earth

ridiculous cosmologies are the order of the day.
Beliefs can survive no-one's believing them.
are tougher than scorpions. harder to evict
than tropical lizards from a room.
The odour of mythologies lingers in our modern minds,
paleolithic fragments fleck our brains.
Somewhere someone has a belief you would find comforting
if you could bring yourself to hold it.

Peach Trees

In our back yard were peach trees

upon which we practised no method.
The cuffing seasons did all of the gardening.
Up to a point they behaved no differently
from their more doctored neighbours,
equally courted by bees and children,
and in the spring the pink frocks of their buds

17
 came out welt completely disguising
the hard winter knuckles of the seamstress.
The peaches formed and grew as big as testicles.
And that was it.
They remained small and gray
and when they slid to the floor overnight
they had the whiskery faces of old women.
Postmortem attempts with a breadknife
revealed soft, white pips like grubs.
There were no fake walnuts of sturdy, tumescent seed
wetly parting from flesh
in the purposeful division of textures -
only a shrivelled, homogeneous puberty.
But they were excellent as missiles in our games.
They had the satisfying reach of stones
and arrived safely but with the needed authority.
When decks had been drawn around them
the trees were serviceable as rigging.
If nothing else, our imaginations grew on them.
Christ, that more exacting horticulturalist,
would have had them chopped down
or assigned them the villain's role in a parable.
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18
 David H. M. Wright
Ode To An Australian Vase

This vase has wide arms and generous lips

A shape caressed from clay, eased
Squeezed from thumb and soul-searching tips
Of fingers, spun whirlwind wild, hot fjred;
Welcomes - conveys an illimitable sense
Of far-horizoned openness.
But how fragile, paper thin, the porcelain
Stands here naked, alone} without defence
Rings at the rimmed rub of fingers
Ex;sts to be replete, brimmed, full
And yet cannot determine how it will be filled.
love's receptacle; both vase and chalice
How nobly it holds the pure essence
How openly is ravished} broken, spilled.

On The Beach
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Give me not the sun-drenched shore and azure sea

Every day but, in their way, overcast skies,
A grey and secretive surf that swells and spumes,
Betrays, is subject to dark moods, flays and fumes.
And give me too a wild wind arbitrarily
lifting and whipping sand on skin and into eyes,
Rubbing salt on wounds, wafting the acrid smell
Of rotting weed. Give me a jagged edge to shell}
The severed heads of fish} beached blue bottle's sting
And birds, buffetted to death, left mouldering.
Give me, in short} the extremes of the swing,
Real height to the wave; between crest and trough
A span that gives some measurement to a man.
Give me some throwing-high-in-fierce-wind winnowing,
Some clear separation of kernels from the chaff, .
Some heart. The middle road is easy enough. "-

19
 Chiselled Stones

If you make an altar of stones for me~ do not build it out of cut stones"
because when you use a chisel on stones" you make them unfit for my use.
EXODUS 20, 25.

Leave the jagged edges, the crevices, the flaws,

leave the lichens clinging crumpled in the cracks,
Do not seek cold-metal-cut to change, but pause,
For, to the simple, unscholared, uncrafted eye,
In their own time, even the most humble things
Will, unabashed, reveal themselves, take off their clothes,
Bring close, charge space, lift, lift on chariot wings.
The cut stone tight-lipped, straight-faced speaks,
Fits plumb-lined precisely, has permanence, sits square,
Builds bold towers that reach to pinnacles of air.
No, for my prayer give me the stones unhoned:
Chiselled forms and words are like fruit of knowledge seized,
Wisdom's veneer; they strike the object inches
Too low, camouflage the glory with sewn leaves.
Leave my stones natural, smeared with soil, free.
Build my altar to the unseen, nameless One,
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The Great I AM who, what He will, will be,

known best in desert dust's ephemera Icy.

20
 Francis Faller

The Campground
A maverick wind brings the valley
exotic smells of jasmine,
orange blossom and peach,
brings legendary faith in country cures.
Billows of salt, tan oil and ocean
rock the tents and tremble trees.
The weekend is anchored in fenced-off, dusty sea.

It wasn't easy to sail here.

Road blocks, schools of surly children,
farmstores wrecked on tidal reefs -
their spume-encrusted canvas awnings
flapping remorsefully at idyllic days
of watermelon and tomato affluence -
they all contrived to send the campers scuttling home.
Our journeys traversed provinces of strife
and reeled our memory into this protected zone.
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To flee oppressive burdens we visitors came,

to exhale the anonymity
of collective guilt, of landlocked smog.
In smog and guilt we lost our bodies and names.
Now, incited by a simple sun,
we plead an ancient, dubious right:
exclusion from oppression's shame.

From atop the branches pours leisure's dexedrine:

a tinker bird, tapping dents
from damaged city hearts,
holding the steady pulse of a monitor machine.

Grass rolls like water in a bay.

We sojourners are cunningly confused.
Sun and crafty wind
coddle this roadstead with peace,
and for a few balmy days
level the rebellious swells
of restless multitudes.

21
 Midday Concert
The programme is familiar,
tension in the ear as well.
Soon they'll both be broken
by news of the numbers killed.

It'll be a lie. A raised

baton conducts the tongue,
and the voices of deception
bark like old baboons.

No longer can sun and concerts

cushion the news with calm,
nor even the chords of Mozart
sprinkle their usual balm.

The sonata - like a startled

sparrow - will suddenly fly.
What incredible targets
were chosen for bombing today?

But Mozart's honest movements

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are thrilling as never before;

exuberant sonatas
rage at the lies of war!

Christmas Eve
The lack of news is common enough,
but tonight's different. It's Christmas Eve.
An hour ago - with a roar of fury -
hail blasted the summer trees.

Our carols are interrupted by puddles,

mosquitoes, and shaken passenger jets.
A volley of pamphlets and overdrafts
has pelted consumers. Everything's wet.

But candles are lit. From fear or charity

the armistice holds good.
Unity burns. The candles are lit,
and factions disperse. We drink to the grim mood.

22
 Gordon Stuart

Journey

after travelling the best part of the day

which is six or seven hours in the toyota, we arrived
in the land of god; everybody reckoned that it was worth the trip
although my feet in slip slops were smelling from the sweat
and the car was filled with screaming kids and sweet papers
and tins of soft drinks; and Muriel giving an uninterrupted commentary
on how to save the whales.

Toward evening my head was swimming with thousands of dirt brown

landscapes lumped together; so that I could not be sure what was
real and what was illusion.

When we reached the land of god there were fewer instances of

stonings by people 'of colour'
- which is nice.

By the time we had reached god's country there was an ache in my back
my eyes, my legs were stiff
Reproduced by Sabinet Gateway under licence granted by the Publisher (dated 2009).

and darkness filled the world.

23
 A. Kolski Horwitz

The Butcher

Because the money was good,

I went back to Durban by the sea
and picked up a cleaver
as I had done since the age of eight.

I could tell you about the thirty-four Afs

who spread saw-dust and ice,
downing cane spirit behind ruby carcasses;
little snorts of Tugela.

The Afs are not given to saving.

Kwa Mashu has gone to the devil.
Even honest workmen who put on no airs,
are short-changing their bone-gnawing brothers.

I stripped fat with Phineas Moloto,

chief of the hackers.
We'd drive in my suspect car
to his deedless city.
Reproduced by Sabinet Gateway under licence granted by the Publisher (dated 2009).

And Phineas would whisper,

rising from a whore's imboia bed
(we'd take the pick of the mamas),
that his doctor was right:

Life should be a silver Mercedes

gliding at all hours in the basin of hills -
hard tyres for tarmac,
pap ones for mud.

Phineas had a fetish for leather,

50ft laps and tea.
"Hold me, hold me, mama! JJ,
he would cry before coming.

Then on Monday, again in his stained apron,

he would reach into the fridges
to slice deeper and deeper
into the red.

24
 S.D. Tirivanhu
The Sugar Cane Cutter

From the mountain filled with smoke

we came clattering and jittering with the train rhythm.
Cursing the forked words of Nonqawuze
foretelling the sun which was not to set.

Our women know that we the sons of time

must depart to Natat
to plant, cultivate and cut the sugarcane
they need the most.
Tataomkhulu once told me
that the sons of Shaka refused,
denied, claiming it deprived their ancestors'
spirits.

But i the sugarcane cutter don't feel the least offended,

by the Demi year of the white man's work
and another of planting my fields back at home.
For in the morrow we go,
to the fields ahead
Reproduced by Sabinet Gateway under licence granted by the Publisher (dated 2009).

the only friend being my Panga.

The onlooker may say we cut the cane,

but to me
with dawn a few hours gone,
it is a battle, a war which
i alone command and captain.

Attacking, with the swiftness of an eagle,

platoons, if i have worked lacking,
but battalions, having worked hard,
I work singing the ancient songs of my
long forgotten youth of Amakhenkwe
passing the day warming from the morning's dew.

To me what is cane?
For when i see the cane rat i stalk
and chase
to feed me on the lonely nights of the compounds.
Feasting my womenfolk's sorrow.

25
 J
Heh Ibethile and we drink the dust of the fields
with Amahewu;
yes, the sour porridge.

Come sunset, I set aside and count the bundles

for it is them which relieve me from the
gushing and snarling wind,
the bitter hot sun on the cold freezing days.
Six months have passed elapsing with tons of sugar.

Mfondini how j miss home,

the women of Natal are not virgins
the money i had they have taken,
for the single night we shared.

The Nduna said Jongivondwe your time has come,

you will depart tomorrow,
what joy what sorrow,
I have none of these feelings,
I am illiterate, working for my survival.

To me i have earned
Reproduced by Sabinet Gateway under licence granted by the Publisher (dated 2009).

what i have come for.

What is sugar?
To me it is only white particles.
Let them sugar the sour.

26
 Brandon W. Broil

A State Of Emergency

We are boiling again ...

minds are gripped again!
My hands are shaking,
a little u ncon troll a bl y.
Oh God! Not another day
of violent brutality ...
Please, stop your beatings.
Look at us properly:
Have we really hurt you?
That you must retaliate
with such thick hatred?
Push, push ... pushing,
you are pushing us
too far, much too far!
We are so hurt, look ...
So grieved, mortally
and desperately
at a loss.
Look at us, please!
Reproduced by Sabinet Gateway under licence granted by the Publisher (dated 2009).

We ask why?
Still we ask you, why?
Why?
Look properly,
look straight at us;
see our decency -
Look, please look and
see our innocence.
We are caring people,
much in need of goodness;
more than you give ...
to us, or to that
young man there.
He may be passionate,
perhaps misunderstood.
Give him a chance to
speak his mind, as
you speak yours;
always speaking yours.
Please dear God -
Oh no! Oh God!
You've shot another ...

27
 Andre Hattingh

An Epitaph For The Ides Of June

Our Mother was killed today
on her way home from shopping.
In her basket was some Vim, some Jik
and two tins of Chilli beans,
intended for our supper.
No-one is very-hungry.

Our Mother was walking down a dusty street;

her right leg and her back her only troubles.
Then there were bullets, bottles and stones,
long knives; even fires.
Oh, and lots of hate.
The hate moved on
and in the rubble lay our Mother:
somehow flat and empty,
like a stranger - an ordinary person,
who crossed the path
of someone else's battle.
Reproduced by Sabinet Gateway under licence granted by the Publisher (dated 2009).

((Who killed her?" you ask.

(tWas it a bullet?"
The wounds were quite indiscriminate:
fatal and anonymous.
So many
for just one life.
Why do you ask?
Who would you blame
for the death of an ordinary person?

We children sit in silence coping

and hoping the quiet will stop
the clamour of our remembering,
a more than ordinary woman.
The police have taken her in a white van.
"To see, 11 they said, ((what killed her."
Her! (Your 'her' is my Motherl )
Are they bli nd?
Can't they count?
To most she's just another number.

28
 The family sits alone
in a lightless room.
We cannot find the matches.
The sympathetic shadows
hide the emptiness
at the end of our table.
Today will end in tears;
the moment filled with sighs and echoes.
Tomorrow and thereafter
will bring some other passions.

Mark Espin
Under A Dawn Moon

The various patterns of curtained light,

are dulled by the slow blaze
of the golden fireball
as it crosses the day.
The dawn moon's shape
pincers downward.
Reproduced by Sabinet Gateway under licence granted by the Publisher (dated 2009).

Remnants of a south-easter shiver

Strangely romantic,
it twirls an early daisy
in its frosty breath
and lapses into laziness.

Movement crawls back into beings

left sagged by yesterday's work.
From between sweat-soiled sheets
tentative steps are taken;
Still shaking off the comatose state.
Beds cool in bodies' absence,
are later neatly made
only for it to take again tonight
- two tired thuds.
Men move out into the slimy cold, and
Women are left to resuscitate a dead house.

29
 J
The autumned tress nakedness
implies a taint of pessimism
And full-fleshed leaves may
never again fill their barren sprouts.
A bee scratches in vain
for pollen on a rotting sunflower.

A single bird chirps ignorantly

perhaps satirically;
sent by them to fool and entice.
It took flight and shrunk
to a tiny speck of reconnaissance.

Along the roads

to town buses
urge trapped commuters
to their dungeons of employment.

Each day there is one

person less at the bus-stop queue.
Official reasons
for dismissal only
Reproduced by Sabinet Gateway under licence granted by the Publisher (dated 2009).

confound the mind.

There are no human

sounds this morning.
The placid atmosphere insinuates
a tremor} an earthquake
that may yet
ripple the flat
monotony of everything.

The untrusting bird

returns with armoured
men in steel trucks.

But violence fails

to defuse only
exacerbates the strife.

30
 Helen Segal

Yearned He Boyhood landscapes ...

Yearned he boyhood landscapes
(tho' never left had he the city)
when leg and arm and tongue
cartwheeled space and speech
uncramped by consequence
or categories of we and they.
Everyone he was
Feared never he the sideway look
or noun and verb
Never knew he place when finger pointed
since stood he either side.
Black he was and white
and every language spoke
his heart in mouth

Now low inside his chair

reads he newspapers
and listens to the news
Reproduced by Sabinet Gateway under licence granted by the Publisher (dated 2009).

his mind a playground

of dangerous toys
that rat-a-tat his sleep and wake
and undermine his charity.
No-one he is
least himself of all.

31
 In Camera

lived he an inch eighth

beneath the skin.
It was thrills and spills
quicktalk and hearty handshakes
lit candle tables and she and he
pictureframed each other's dreams.
(they called it love)

while a world in travail

scarecrowed children
and man shotsnap man his only other
Positive in his view
(they called it love)

caught he was by trick photography

and even today Thursday 1st
reel he cannot free.
Reproduced by Sabinet Gateway under licence granted by the Publisher (dated 2009).

32
 James A. Sey
Urban litany
Without words left to command
Without words left to serve
Without words left to speak,
Feel the pain of squalor,
The pain of concrete resilience.

Without a note of warning

Without a blackened brazier
Without a softened memory,
The year skids around the corner
And dies at the empty intersection.

Without the will to cross the road

Without the will to cry
Without the will to shout your name
Up into the canyons
Of bloodless light above your head.
Reproduced by Sabinet Gateway under licence granted by the Publisher (dated 2009).

Without the means to understand

Without the means to love
Without the means to light a fire,
Only the tools of death remain,
The stones to strike the spark of hate.

Without the road to exit

Without the joke at which to laugh
Without defence against the night,
Drifting, rotting, sinking, dying,
The city and the past betray themselves again.

33
 Rod MacKenzie

Hunger

Beyond the wire the township starts to thicken

like charred earth in rain, in a mist
that will not shed its sun, in a drizzle
you feel should have long since shed your skin.
You're cold outside, and you're sure
this false dawn is another figment -
stained wool clinging to barbed wire, meat gone.
But in the thinning night there's a farmhouse,
and inside, a man and his family sleep, sated.

And none of it lets you forget you're European.

That under this black earth become flesh
there is still a lean wolf, slavering,
and you fee/lean enough to believe he's here.
And still cold, outside, you turn round
to stare back at this floundering hill
you've been trailing up for hours,
back at the farmhouse, the tattered wire,
Reproduced by Sabinet Gateway under licence granted by the Publisher (dated 2009).

the township, your footprints.

It must be all a figment. Your footsteps

can't already be a part of your history -
carnivorous, uncaring, sucking the earth.
So it has to be a figment. At most
you can only be a hint in the yellowing grey.
So you've got to stop believing.
The best you can do is to turn away,
lean into your shoulders and pretend
there's nothing left that will bleed.

34
 Gerry Fenge

Matopos, Early June

So what did happen at Nswatugi?
We sat with cave paintings
Then clambered the hill above:
And there was the outspread Matopos -
Kopjes of granite and bush thrown
Together like wreckage,
Valleys amongst, and sunset
Spread on the tops. .. Then?.
Well others descended
While I paused to watch.
And the hills spoke.
So strong came their press
I turned to check. But each
Became only a hill again -
For I searched with world's
Eyes, and heard with world's
Ears. When I stopped, though,
It returned, unmistakeable:
Reproduced by Sabinet Gateway under licence granted by the Publisher (dated 2009).

The language of hill to hill

In relation; the ancient speaking
Of creatures, clefts, secret
Minerals; the words of endurance
Beneath day's glare and resonance
Of night; through deep of years
And hum of centuries; speaking
The meaning of what placed them thus,
Speaking their whole bodily being there.

I scarcely caught it -
Glanced at
Descending backs -
Then I gazed to the grass
Of the valley beyond.
And the plain swayed.
Dizzy I blinked
Sideways to reclaim my eyes.
But when I looked once more
The plain was rippling,

35
 It was swaying and sweeping
As though I would slowly fall to
Its rhythmic spread, chest
First, floating to communion
Of soaring plain and expanding self.

Return by car-
IILook at those clouds," I breathed,
It Marooned on a sea of light. "

I thought they were accurate words,

But the others chuckled
I was getting a bit poetic.
I wasn't though: the hills were,
And I'd spoken from in
Their motion - brief empathy.
Reproduced by Sabinet Gateway under licence granted by the Publisher (dated 2009).

36
 Dorothy Murray

The Jerusalem Windows, Hadassah Hospital

For Marc Chagall

Once more I stood within range

Of that spectrum of light
Every rainbow colour explored
Celebrated in symbols
Cryptic to the uninitiated
Obscurely perceived through colour changes
The coldness of blues, vibrant golds, greens,
Crimson of arterial blood.

This time a young woman declaiming

( Each panel represents
One of Israel's tribes'
Reuben, 'unstable as water'
Asher, of whom Moses said
'let him bathe his foot in oil' -
Fish swimming, a crowned bird, animals
Grotesque or gentle, hands raised to bless.
Reproduced by Sabinet Gateway under licence granted by the Publisher (dated 2009).

( The lantern's panels were dismantled,

Buried in the earth's dark
Until war clouds spent
Their ruinous rain.' The voice ceased
And I moved out into a light
No longer prismatic, fractured,
But warmly shining where a symbolic heart
Beat above a shallow pool.

37
 Sefad
An ascent was necessary
To reach this place
Among hills in Upper Galilee
Where the air is pure.

Implicit in its streets

Of ringing stones, old walls,
Is a shedding of the superfluous
A sense of wisdom bestowed.

Ancient synagogues
Bear testimony to a time
When rabbis and scholars thronged
These narrow cobbled ways.

Fugitives from Spain

They came in that dark time
Heralding the dawn, the imminent
Coming of the Messiah.
Reproduced by Sabinet Gateway under licence granted by the Publisher (dated 2009).

A mystical consummation
Was sought with nuptial fervour
Holy desire - the Sabbath
Ushered in as a bride.

The medieval splendour is gone

Yet pilgrims still come to old Sefad
To see its ancient synagogues
Revere its holy scrolls.

38
 Maria Petratos
Poem For Sophy

Well before Christmas, she's lived here,

Black and fat
Zulu infant,
Roaming everywhere
Around the house

On knees bare, explores

Table, chair
Small chubby hands,
Gripping wooden furniture,
Completely

Arresting her attention -

Such inanimate objects
That don't speak
When touched
She
Reproduced by Sabinet Gateway under licence granted by the Publisher (dated 2009).

Shrieks with laughter

Who'd think a nine month girl,
Clad in pink, yellow,
Loose-fitting aprons, tires
Little

Of adults, and
Their inventions,
Neither says right or
Wrong, just
Her

Full skirts
Billowing sweet colours,
And
Courage in her
Big, brown eyes.

39
 The Month Of March

Oh, the wind whistles J whistles

ShrillJ the season, Autumn knows what is
To be taken away, provide a return of
Plenitude in SpringJ pragmatically enough;

The yellow garden, sheds J too ripe

To survive, discards all the old summer leaves
Spreads yesterday's carpetJ briefly and
With its very own mottled J splendid J character

Autumn, dances and swirls colours, that seem

To lean towards death J actually lively, of
All the workJ leaf and sunlight perform together,
A sort of temporary marriage

For three months whole. Autumn's a new bride

Wearing mainly gold J nourished long by 10veJ
Birds quit; will themselves, to escape Winter's
Brutal onslaught, in motion.
Reproduced by Sabinet Gateway under licence granted by the Publisher (dated 2009).

Singing, singing their flight over land.

And Autumn, pledges her first vows, solemn J
All brown detail showing an
Absence, absence of summer's context:

Of those blossoms easy, and praiseworthy!

April Wedding

Sunflowers kiss, kiss twice

Too much, resemble colour of sweet-ripened
Corn, exchange, notes embellished in
March. Betrothals happen, soft and swishing

To and fro. In fields} where a church stood

Centuries ago, organising ceremonies, for

40
 Flower, stalk and cob. Now the mad March hare
Scampers lightly, furry feet, prickling underneath
Tread of dry, bracken grass. Nose twitching,
Hayfever grabs us and we sneeze all day

long. Grasshoppers, practice polka-frenzied

Waltzes. Waves of green air, float past us.

On a Sunday morning, in the country,

See no cloud-nimbus shape in the sky
Ready, to help the rain fall. Farmers
Keep azure blue company

Perhaps a dog or two. A vicar picks up

Bible, black hat, delivers sermon to

Kind folk listening intently. Booming,

Parsimonious words, do they
Ring true. The village reaches deep into
Pocket,

Preacher, Preacher, when I marry

Reproduced by Sabinet Gateway under licence granted by the Publisher (dated 2009).

Geese will bless me, once.

At night, when a chill freezes my bones,

Owls comfort wide-eyed
Big, luminous moon, included
Never, never, try to fool me

With white dress.

Bridegrooms arrive late,

On, April first, March, hands

Over its season:
Distant thunder, roars, tempestuous,
Unusually loud, for this time of year.

41
 Poems Of Our Climate

Francis Faller, Weather Words. 10hannesburg: Ad. Donker. 1986.

Francis Faller's collection Weather Words was joint winner of the 1985 AA
Mutual LifeJ Ad. Donker Literary Award. His poems have appeared
regularly in small poetry journals such as New Coin. and his long poem 'The
lukskei River' took first prize in the category for narrative poetry at the 1820
Festival Poetry Competition in 1985. Yet despite these achievements I
found Faller's book disappointing~ there are some good poems, but there is an
unevenness in quality that one does not expect to find in an award-winning
collection.
Varied in subject and theme, Weather Words includes several politically
inspired poems, evocations of contemporary urban life, poems about adult
love and several concerning the innocence of childhood. The title refers to
Faller's aim of suggesting analogies between states of nature and the poetic
process in relation to personal and social experience. This idea forms the
core of his long narrative poem 'lukskei River', as well as of 'Storm in the
Suburb' and 'As if it Mattered' (from which the phrase 'weather words' is
taken). Faller is often sensitive to the nuances of the natural world, creating
evocative and atmospheric images, and I was also struck by the tension in the
collection between his creative impulses - imagistic and romantic-symbolist
Reproduced by Sabinet Gateway under licence granted by the Publisher (dated 2009).

- and his obvious need to justify his role as an artist writing under an
oppressive political regime. In his poem 'Mimic' he says:

History has come of age ...

and the terrified arts have nothing to say
nothing to give this decisive day.

Unfortunately his own fears of having 'nothing to give' to the historical

processes at work in our society tend to dominate his poetry.
Faller's problem is that of many white South African poets and writers in
our present social and cultural climate. Mothobi Mutloatse has proclaimed
that white literature is 'empty' because it lacks the 'black experience'; whites,
he insinuates, cannot adequately write of oppression and suffering from their
position of sheltered privilege and safety and are therefore consigned to the
periphery of meaningful political and cultural activity. Yet many white
poets feel constrained by the pressures of moral conscience to attempt to
register a response to social and historical forces and this creates the need for
an appropriate discourse or register. The rhetoric of struggle and revolution
has become the province of black poets; white writers find themselves divided
between the formal demands of the inherited romantic-symbolist ethos -

42
 with its emphasis on individual experience, imaginative transformations and
metaphysical essences - and the opposing demands of political statement-
making. Faller's solution has been to attempt to blend metaphors and
images drawn from the natural world with political insights, but the different
modes of discourse set up different expectations within a poem, resulting in
awkward incongruities and often generating banal sentiments. 'Honey-
suckle', for example, a celebration of a flower's beauty is made to co-exist
uneasily with the imagery of emergency:

Up the face-brick garage wall

from a patch of sand grey as ash
the honeysuckle liberates its soul

It blooms as proud and pink

as eyelids at a funeral
and its clammy smell
pretends to scupper gloom.
An overwhelming aromatic arsenal,
as strong as teargas
intoxicating as people's dreams.

Similarly, the innocent sparrow becomes a 'cache of feathers' at the mercy of

climatic changes masquerading as political forces:
Reproduced by Sabinet Gateway under licence granted by the Publisher (dated 2009).

Already enraged gangs of frost

skirmish at the borders of the garden
and the green safety of summer
withers in a harsher sharper light.
Morning aims at the sparrows nest
with the muzzle of its gun ...

Perhaps even more jarring is 'In the Restaurant', where Faller attempts to
capture the tensions of white South African life:

Between us stretches the great gingham desert

Our words scud along the dirty plates
and, like a serviette, the night is crumpled
on the floor ...

The poem is motivated by agenuine sense of personal inadequacy in response

to forces of social upheaval; yet Faller's articulation of this idea is undercut by
the failure of his imagery. In the third stanza the conflict between moral
purpose and the ambiguities of figurative language collapses into the bathos

43
 of a 'creme carameP:

Fingers pulverize an empty glass. There's something

Unsayable glinting in the stem - and we've said it all.
The trees in the road: their rustling rises to a shout
that wobbles our blanched horizon of creme caramel.

Despite this, it is not impossible for a romantic-symbolist poet to produce

'political' poetry; it has been done by W.B. Yeats, and more recently, Seamus
Heaney_
Faller appears to be aware of the problems facing poets in a harsh political
climate, and, as his acknowledgements indicate, three of his poems are
patterned after the work of modern Spanish poets. Pre-Civil War Spain
resembled contemporary South Africa in many respects, including the social
and the artistic~ in literature one found a tension between 'pure' poetry and the
demands ofpolitical1ife. The models provided by Spanish poets under such
circumstances have inspired some of Faller's more successful poems. Miguel
de U namuno is the figure behind 'Magopa: The Resettlement', in which
natural images act as objective correlatives and suggest a contrast between
man's destruction and nature's healing abilities:

Like an outcrop of rock

Reproduced by Sabinet Gateway under licence granted by the Publisher (dated 2009).

you are enclosed all summer

by a golden sea of thatch waving in the breeze,
and above you all the swallows -
who do not care what century it is -
incite themselves to the harvest dance.
Magopa, village of the dead!

The poem concludes with a depiction of the deserted village at night, where the
nocturnal inhabitants of the African bushveld become sympathetic spirits
who unite to redress the injustices of man-made laws. In a different vein, the
passionate tenderness and psychological insights of Pedro Salinas provide the
starting-point for 'Calling Through', in which the image of a wall acts as a
metaphor for the metaphysical barriers between lovers:

I did not call today

I heard you - often -
behind this frail wall:
dabbing, chipping, humming.
There was no need, today, to call.

44
 The joyful celebration of existence characteristic of Jorge Guillen is trans-
mitted in the piece 'In Lust Awakening', where Faller employs a sexual
metaphor in order to describe his pleasure in the beauty of morning:

Now, dew on the grass; a wind

stirring your candid nipples.
The cricket's electric song
ripples through the universe.

This I long to penetrate,

to see pale concrete ignite,
to draw a woman's afterblush
from its callow cheeks of light.

Faller's strength as a poet, his ability to evoke the texture and spirit of place
through sensitively observed images, is best seen in a series of poems depicting
the less glamorous aspects of Hillbrow life. Written in the tradition of
Baudelaire's 'fourmjlJante cite' and T.S. Eliot's 'unreal city', these poems
examine the sordid life not of Paris or London, but of our local metropolis.
In 'Noord Street' Faller signals his debt to Eliot and the Symbolists by
prefacing his poem with a quotation from ·Preludes' and by using the earJier
poet's fragmented imagistic style. The poem offers an ironic contrast
between ideal pastoral conventions and a contemporary urban reality:
Reproduced by Sabinet Gateway under licence granted by the Publisher (dated 2009).

a hunch-backed streetlamp
probing like old Socrates
loiters around a snotty urchin
who rises from his bower
of beer boxes and papers
to demand five cents from the baas,
the price for entering his sanctum.
He's the landlord, collecting rents
Owing from the hazy past.

'Our Lady of Hillbrow' depicts the weekly Sunday 'raid' of the Salvation
Army on the dense flatland, and we are presented with an ironic view of
prepackaged religion in it consumer society where the street becomes a
cathedral:

from either side blink

her cathedral's holy images:
a saint lit up in Camel-ecstasy,
fat cherubs adoring Solly K,
the leaning crucifix of Kinekor.

45
 The central figure - a young woman - personifies the limited consciousness
of the spiritually impoverished urban inhabitant; for her the raucous service is
a 'weekly shot of hope' and provides an escape into a 'noisy neon heaven'-·
the only one she is capable of imagining:

She lifts her head towards the sky,

awaiting her assumption
into a billboard flashing through the smog
high above this grey sceptical block.

While these 'city poems' offer evidence of genuine ability and can even be
compared with those of Douglas Livingstone concerning Durban in his
collection Eyes Closed against the Sun, it is perhaps worth suggesting that the
Baudelairean city poem is somewhat dated and peripheral in the 1980s. The
contemporary South African city offers a dangerous and exciting blend of
~first' and 'third' worlds, in its affluence, poverty, crime, political violence and
brotherhood - this heterogeneous milieu has yet to find its poet.

Cecily Lockett
Reproduced by Sabinet Gateway under licence granted by the Publisher (dated 2009).

46