Failed execution
Last request: a camera
Aimed at the man with the gun.
He lifts the rifle,
I click the shutter,
The photograph on the screen
Is bequeathed
To my father.
The bullet collides somewhere near
My heart.
I stagger home –
Ashamed
To be not dead.
Now the task is
To live
Furtively.
Boland Bluebeard
They were unruffled,
The artist and his mistress, when I arrived in a battered kombi
To save the wife.
But she had already disappeared.
Only pink water in a bucket and a bloodstain
That smelled of detergent and would not wash out
On the floor near the fridge.
It is happening to me now.
As I try to hide behind the rose bushes,
He says: “Did you really think you could escape?”
Fishing 1
Angling for water
The fish leapt
Under the bridge
Into my arms
A soft egg wounded
By gills
I knew it would die
Like that.
Tick bite fever
My knight in shining armour
Turned out to be an engorged tick
With no eyes
Who crawled out of the veld and drank my blood until I became so sick
He had to turn to another source of life
What they don’t tell you in fairy tales
Is that there is nothing
Behind the polished armour –
Inside the shiny smooth body of the tick you will find only
Your own blood.
Defeat
I never thought
You could defeat me,
I always thought
My hate stronger.
But you are a white man,
with white hair
And so you and your henchmen
burned me,
Turned me into something
Hideous,
A parody of myself –
Cast out.
Remember. I am not on the side
of your tribe.
And the past is not forgotten.
Cast out –
I stand with the miners of Geduld
who cough up
Pieces of lung in shacks
near Mthatha,
And with the Cubans
who fought against you
At Cuito Cuanavale.
This wound
This wound inside
Most days sits quiet, seeping
As imperceptibly as blood murmurs through capillaries –
But oh
how the merest thought or kiss can tear open
The thin membrane, disgorging bits and then
I am on on the edge, almost falling
into that yawning void –
the solar plexus.
Northern Hemisphere Haiku I
Under grey English
Skies in June, I miss the smell
Of frangipani.
Southern Hemisphere Haiku I
Over these dark waves,
Lion’s Head and mute Apostles,
Wheels the Southern Cross.
A Disappearing World
The forest is being razed
Turned into powdered dust
From out of a chasm of hewn vegetation
They drag a panda bear
And her cub
Bound for some zoo, or worse
I rush to the mother,
And reunite them
Then carrying both creatures I run
Though the forest, now busy with men
What shall I feed these skepsels
When I take them into hiding?
Suddenly in my arms they grow
Smaller and smaller
As if I have been carrying two insects –
Lost, they have fallen
I search the dusty ground but see nothing
If I had my cellphone here I could call for help.
Bloom
Tears
and stars
Bloom in darkness.
Settler’s hospital
I was 19 going on 20
when they put me into the hospital for settlers
I cannot remember why, though it must have been
for something shameful
I remember the white ward
with two ancient white ladies, fellow settlers
one was dying
the other had lost her faculties
or at least some of her reason in the sense that
reason is focused on present coordinates
she kept rattling the end of her bed
like a cage and calling for “Florence”
and her little dog called Tover
Tover, Tover, where is my little dog
Tover
sometimes she swam into the present
and focused on her gasping companion
calling for the nurses to feed her grapes
as grapes are very digestible
sometimes I put my hands to my eyes
and feel the bones of my skull
it’s coming for all of us
the bones rattling their cage
wanting to get out
like Tover who escaped through
the hole in the fence
New Pome: for a journalist
I see your face in photographs of your father’s
Curved nose and sleepy eyes.
Cocooned in work and marijuana
You are remarkably high functioning
For a stoner or dreamer, half awake
Like me you come from a backwater
Rural place
Hardly on the map
But your history is mysterious
Another place, across the country
Perhaps subtropical
I lived once in Eshowe,
Which is not too far
We didn’t like the snakes
I doubt you have you ever loved a woman
So much you would choose her
Over a line of cocaine
Or over the next hit of public adulation
Yes, I know what keeps you going
And it ain’t me babe
Wow Lucy. These are really great.
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