Spring 2010

Here
The stream’s murmured psalms;
the clear, worn earthen path;
the sacred leaf-green light
in the aisles and naves
of this
solitary forest trail.

Michael Andersen - Mist

Clean
Tall, ordered, dark
fir-feathered quills
write calligraphies of mist,
words of

repletion
contentment
saturation
peace.

Morning dew
on garden grass.
In mist’s intimacy:
fresh, clean steps.

GABEBA BADEROON

How to Find Something Lost
Let the lost thing, or the loss itself, call to you.
There is a reciprocity in vanished objects
that makes them want to rejoin you.
Long after you stop searching,
lost chances, lost causes, lost loves circle back.

Track memory. Loss lets you see
again. You tidied the house, went
outside before the rain to gather
the fallen branches for kindling.
You planted the toad lily, its white
and mauve blossoms dappled as the light,
near the cat’s grave.
You gathered stones to make a circle.
And all the while, the leaves fell,
and then the rain.
In those wet and perfect
disguises you look
for what is lost.

After you’ve stopped searching, you return
the torch you keep by the bedside
in case of a power failure.
The lid on the box where you’d packed
away the earphones looks askew.
You nudge it aside and there,
tangled in the cords, catching two circles of light,
something comes back: your spectacles.

Mapping
As travellers, drawing
lines from place
to place, we copy
the nervous conceit of mapmakers.
We crop the edges of our worlds
like failed photographs,

but our discarded parts,
with their uncertain shifts
from inside to outside
show that definiteness
is only the edge
of desire.

(from The Dream in the Next Body, Kwela/Snailpress, 2005)

Cecilia Ferreira - Window

GARY CUMMISKEY

Between floors

Midnight

Darkness

Thinking
of Bob Kaufman
arrested
and thrown
into
the police station lift

The cops surround him

Stop the lift
between
floors

Then beat him

RICHARD DE NOOY

Farewell
Perhaps I should have been there
When you took your leave
Even unwelcome guests deserve
A cordial parting wave.
Perhaps I should have come
To watch you go,
But I was elsewhere, living,
When you went
And you did not look back
You did not see me
At the gate
Where I stood
Writing this
Farewell

ISOBEL DIXON

Struzzi
Shabby ballerinas,
all gone at the knees,
they sashay through
the green lucerne –
a verdant stage –
their dusty tutus
drab reminders
of those glory days:
the scalloped footlights,
the applause, Swan Lake
and Les Sylphides.
Their lashes flutter
as they bend
their supple necks
to swallow stones
like half-remembered
notes that rattle
in their tiny brains:
poco piu allegro now,
peck-peck, peck-peck.

Into the Wild
Rare flower seekers
found his car, a hulk
of desert metal,
all his burnt cash petals
long since blown.

Moose hunters in Alaska
found the magic bus:
Tolstoy, Pasternak, Thoreau,
his Taina plant lore book;
and, shrunk to a husk,

Alexander Supertramp,
his lonely trail blazed back
into himself. And seared
on the undeveloped reel,
pre-image of a soul.

How will they find us,
what trace of all
we’ve saved or slain?
Beautiful blueberries,
seed, moose, river, stone –
the things we’ve known
and sometimes rightly named.

Richard de Nooy - Wood

FINUALA DOWLING

The bed between us
Sometimes we sit at twilight with our feet up on the table
that I made out of a bed, as if it were normal
to have a bed, between us.
The bay too lies before us, still still and still lilac.
We have the usual conversation with variations
the one we’ve been having these twenty-eight years

We can talk about anything and we do
which is why it is always the same conversation.
I can say anything to you and I do
I can say, ‘What is your opinion of telephone lines?’
And you will answer immediately — you are not surprised
We are two friends in total accord over telephone lines

Twenty-eight years of Sunday evenings and this same
conversation with variations, and the bed between us,
and me telling you everything about the men who don’t love me
and you telling me everything about the women who are never quite sane

and maybe once every five years or so you say:
‘I’m still in love with you, you know’
it hangs there a little in the lilac twilight
but it’s just part of the conversation
and anyway you know how I’ll reply
so we carry on walking above the bay
or talking and looking at the bed that is now a table
and then you help me open the bottle of wine
and we say whatever we like and you laugh your deep laugh
and I feel relieved that the moment has passed

because I’ve stepped on the wobbly stone again without falling in
I haven’t told how once when I was desperate,
I thought of using you as an escape route;
nearly phoned you from within my cell walls
to beg: ‘Come, save me. Save me now
and I will love you in return with proper love
with married love, with bed love, if you will only save me

But then I saved myself instead –
you never knew; I never said.
I was living out of town.
It was a long time ago.
I can’t tell you
because you wouldn’t let it go if I told you.
It would change this conversation and I love this conversation.
Please let’s sit here with our feet up on the bed,
as if the bed didn’t matter.

Because it doesn’t matter. I promise you that this is love –
this is twilight, this is lilac,
this is telephone line, this is wine,
this is love.

GUS FERGUSON

Nightmare
The birthday boy
standing outside in the rain
making room for the guests

Vuka Afrika
First light, cock crow,
then the plaintive cry
of the distant vuvuzela

SARAH FROST

Threshold
From the bar at the pier’s end
they saw the moon’s pale hands
splay across the sea as if it were a piano,
phrasing waves into a nocturne.

He held his beer glass
steady on the high counter,
as a breeze blew, and her shawl tassels
fluttered against her mouth.

She’d got a raise, she told him.
He was glad, he said.
She watched the night fisherman
step into the shallows, cast his line.

City lights caught
the crescent of the bay,
completing the regretful curve
of ships leaving harbour.

Along the beach
small ordinary fires
warmed the dark.

Byron Loker - Bathers

Free
I lay full-bodied on the beach
and watched my son front the waves.
Cool sky restrained
the sun, a hoop of yellow.

I saw him run, a sandpiper, past
the bathing area, hammocked
by two lifeguard’s poles, towards
fiercer waters, cross-hatched.

Calling him back, my arm stretched
out into a line of warning
I became my father,
Daedalus, afraid for Icarus.

Still, the wild sea mirrored
a naked boy in me, flying.

HAIZI

The Ripening Wheat by Haizi [1964-1989]
It was the year
the new wheat
in Lanzhou
was ripening

My father
who had lived by the river
for thirty years
had come home at last
on his goatskin raft

It was night
someone carrying
a sack of food
pushed open the door

In the light
of the oil lamp
we saw it was my uncle

The two brothers
were silent all night

All that could be heard
was the bubbling
of their water pipes

Each one’s heart enclosed
in the six inch yellow soil –
oh! the ripening wheat!

– translated by Zheng Wei and Robert Berold

KERRY HAMMERTON

When all the mysteries are revealed
We are a slow unfolding,
a soft pencil nudging
the crumpled folds of a manuscript,
a sable brush sweeping sand
from Dead Sea scrolls,
a Timbuktu book.

I am afraid that
when all the mysteries are revealed:
the feel of a first kiss,
the location of that tattoo
surgery scars, toothpaste brands,
plain cotton underwear;

it could all be over.

Helen Moffett - Stone Lace in Old Delhi

COLLEEN HIGGS

From A Balcony
I think of the balcony in your house in Troyeville,
which you still owned long after you didn’t live there
because of the way Joburg works

On New Years’s Eve, a couple of years before the millennium
we stood on the balcony, high in the dark sky, lights below
Distant fireworks, bangs like gunshots, bursts of colour, shouting
and hooting,
the air vibrating

We stood there, the four of us, I’d made a decision
only later I’d feel the pain of
That night on your balcony I was happy
the air was warm and I’d been to your hairdresser in Illovo
and paid more than I believed possible for a haircut

I felt sexy and courageous in my short hair
and my new life ahead. All of this was visible to me
as I stood there, free and full of possibility,
inviting the new to flow into the empty space I was clearing

I didn’t see the pools of tears, the anguish
at leaving the stone house, the white stinkwood trees
which had grown tall and shady in the five years I knew them. I didn’t see
the progressive rage I would feel about a vacuum cleaner

I didn’t see how I would go beyond all of that
to where I truly wouldn’t care, wouldn’t mind
about the vacuum cleaner,
or the books,
or the trees

It’s not quite true that now I don’t care, don’t mind
in fact I am pleased that those things exist, that they are there,
and that they aren’t mine.

From a balcony you can see far into the future
much is visible from a balcony
and there’s that you can’t ever see

ARYAN KAGANOF

poem for andile mngxitama
on the morning of that splendid day of looting
the blacks poured in to gardens wearing
pangas and machettes, cut their way
into melissa’s, and ordered 43 000
flat whites
to go

RUSTUM KOZAIN

Fog
4 A.M. Streets under fog. Streetlights gone.
Except a few down the road
and the moon’s forlorn halo
easily obscured by a plume of breath

laced with nicotine
and the meagre consolation of the last round
from the last open bar
now closed. And its glow also gone.

From the bay, a foghorn.
A long, low note from watch’s end
as if a moan of solitude
from Leviathan cast down into despair by its god.

From a rank doorway, a cry in counterpoint.
A homeless man
swaddled in his nightmares,
the abject of the rich man’s dreams.

Not one lone car carrying young lovers
drunk and eager, warm between
their legs and their hope,
their cold, misfiring hope

that after the revving and keening,
after the splutter home
after the many beers souring the breath
tonight’s love will remain.

There is no God now as lonely as these streets,
this grid
empty like love’s chessboard at game’s end;
or a labyrinth

through which comes a beast loping,
comes loping a big, forlorn dog,
its black coat matt with condensation.
And behind it from the mist emerges a man

on a walk at tangent to the world and time.
The dog loops back to him
to brush at his legs, sniff at his feet.
Then heels like a dutiful companion

at the soft ghost of a chide
as back into the fog they fade
past the last lights down the road,
a man and his black dog.

Michael Andersen - City Survivor

ANTON KRUEGER

the canadian’s nephew
at francesca’s session on ‘liveness’,
a canadian scenographer says that
when his nephew got his hearing,
when they installed a prosthetic,
when he became socialized into sound,
he became less and less confident…
he was freer before (he said), more alive…
and when the boy went into sound it was
“like a kite being reeled in…”

crash landing
watching the plane with
one wheel loose and dangling
as it’s coming in to land…

there’s nothing we can do,
nobody we can call.

so we just watch it
coming down…

ESTER LEVINRAD

Poetry
A dog on the beach
Its whole body is joy
Joy bounds towards the horizon
Streaks back
Misses you by a heart’s breadth
Urging: join me!

Sister-friend is on her haunches, crouched
Watching
Their eyes meet, they bolt together
To the edge of the eye
The end of the world
The sea as free as they.

Ingrid Andersen - Morning sunlight in the kitchen

MOIRA LOVELL

Mirror in Middle-Age
The face in the frame
Is an old likeness
Faded now, foxed and flaking,
(Though originally the work of a master
Some of whose portraits are magnificent.)
Daily the owner of the canvas
(A daubster with brush and palette
Though earnest would-be restorer)
Strokes the cracks; colours the cheeks
Highlights the eyelids; lengthens the lashes
Bristles the brows and relines the lips –
Producing after prodigious labour
Not so much a painting
As a palimpsest.

Mail (a Haiku)
The sun has posted
Itself like an envelope
In our letter-box.

SINDIWE MAGONA

Picture perfect

Inspired by the photographs of UN photographer John Isaac

The picture says it all
You barely see her
Only head and shoulders peep
The rest of her deep in pit
Deep in the dry, dry pit.
Chucking out desert sand
Dug up with bare hands
Under the blazing sun; on and on
In vain pursuit of water,
She digs;
Digs
Till
She’s
Totally out of sight
Deep in the hole
Looking for a drop of
Water.

The village
Somehow it seems preordained
This symmetry of round huts
Muted shades of mud gray
And thatch; easy sameness
Set against soft rounded hills
Green-gray-brown mountains
All exuding an air of
Profound serenity.

(from Please, Take Photographs, Modjaji Press, 2009)

MICHELLE MCGRANE

Ipatiev House, July 1918

In April 1918, Tsar Nicholas II, Tsarina Alexandra, their five children and four retainers were confined to Ipatiev House in Yekaterinburg. On 17 July 1918, the Romanov family and their servants were murdered by Bolsheviks in the house’s basement and their corpses buried in an unmarked grave outside the Siberian town.

Some days, we’re allowed a quiet hour
in the garden. The girls and I sit on the grass,
pearls and diamonds stitched into our corsets.
Alyoshenka dozes, confined to his wheelchair
since the sledding accident on the stairs at Tobolsk.
Yevgeny says he will never walk again.

Beneath palsied poplars, birches and limes,
Nicholas paces the pine palisade, split planks
imprisoning the Voznessenski Street property.
My husband has aged, trim beard streaked grey.
He never wanted to be Tsar.

I search the sky for sungrazing comets,
the pattern and movement of cumulus clouds.
Some divine sign from Our Friend, Rasputin.
A murder of crows recedes on dark wings,
cleaving light, fleeing our fated daguerreotype,
a strangled screech taking seed in my throat.

The Mariinsky’s Prima Retires
It isn’t the lights she misses,
the stints in Western cities,
the swan costume appliquéd
with feathers and Swarovski crystals,

Odette’s seedpearl tiara
perched on her sleek black head,
the lakeside backdrop
framing Ivanov’s choreography,

her Siberian Siegfried’s lifts,
the bouquets and ovations,
the stage door Lotharios.

It’s the ritual of roisin
crushed beneath her pointes,
the extension of her spine
and her long limbs unfolding,

the muscles and sinews singing
as she stretches at the barre
in the company’s studio
above St. Petersburg’s Theatre Square,

the pliancy and precision
of her pliés and frappés repeated
through Tchaikovsky’s score.

Ingrid Andersen - Staircase on Retreat

HELEN MOFFETT

Always
I never stop loving anyone.
But there comes a point
when I dust everything down,
shake out the cloths,
and carry them up to the attic.
There I fold up my love,
lovingly tuck lavender in,
layer it into a cedar chest,
close the lid.

Then I go downstairs,
and get on with things.

But every now and then,
on nights of summer rain,
I’ll open one of my trunks:
and grow immediately dizzy
with the fragrance swarming up;
carrying not just memories
but all that love fresh again.

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 imam intones a passage
from the Qu’ran.
Most merciful,
most gracious
voice and view splice
and for a slice
of a second, I’m jolted
into unexpected joy.

(from Strange Fruit, Modjaji Press, 2009)

KOBUS MOOLMAN

Insomnia
Once again he cannot sleep.
He lies in bed with his eyes shut and the blood
pooling in his belly.

Once again sleep eludes him like light through his fingers.

Once again he gets up, puts on his feet, pours out his eyes
into the dark lake of his window.

The window gathers silence tightly around him like a shawl.

The silence has the colour of night. The colour
of sleepless remembering.

Umfolozi
Crooked thorn tree
overlooking a green valley

Purple distance
ploughing up clods of cloud

Sky of white glass
sharpening sun’s fingers

Black hawk
twisting off a thermal.

(from Light and After, Deep South, 2010)

Mandy Mitchell - Trees

MALIKA NDLOVU

Ash
Fire words hiss and spit from my mother’s mouth
Emitting her wrath, singeing my heart-skin

In seconds I am a quivering girl,
Voice runs dry in the face of her fuming

My water-tongue fails to dilute her venom
Or wash away her certainty of a history of offences

I swallow my opinions, switch to mute, amplify my listening
Suppress the tide rising in me, easing the swell with deepening breath

Each story, she is sure, should have turned out differently
If she hadn’t been denied the victory of the last word, felt she was heard

Assuming her battle stance, her body hardens with each smouldering word
She recalls the detailed lines of assault, blaming everyone but herself

I am her daughter still singing water songs, while she continues flaming
Turning my imagined bridges mid-sentence, to a silent rain of ash

A.R. REID

The Debt Collector
I have no suitable poem
to send to a debt collector
who has ordered that I fax her one.
I thought if I told her I was an aspirant
poet she’d have visions of starvation
and take pity on me

But she wants the money
and a poem too

Grace Road Showgirls
Jacarandas
are naked among
the new greens of other trees

Then on cue, one pent up afternoon,
they spill millions of lilac stars into the
theatre of a thunderstorm

Michael Andersen - Frozen Rose - Berlin Wall, 2010

Michael Andersen - Frozen memories - Berlin Wall, 2010

ARJA SALAFRANCA

Grief
Wouldn’t let her near the body,
wouldn’t want her near the funeral.
But she goes anyway.
She’s known him thirty years.
Must say goodbye.

That’s when the real grief begins,
because she cannot, mustn’t mourn.
Can’t tell the people at the office,
they don’t know about it.
Wouldn’t understand.

She cannot put a notice in the paper,
She cannot sign her name to the flowers at his grave,
just marks it with a series of Xes.

And, of course, she gets nothing.
She stays living in her flat, one bedroom,
a largish lounge.
This will be all she gets.

But when there’s a knock at the door,
a lawyer, a wife, they see, understand.
The photos are everywhere, she and him, on
her bedside table, the dressing table, on a table
in the largish lounge. Smiling on holiday together,
brazenly loving in far-away places.
Then they know.

The wife hands her notice.
She’s to be out in a month.
The flat was never, in fact, in her name.

CRYSTAL WARREN

Too Soon
These things happen
to others, to mothers,
preferably not our own.
Grandmothers, aunts;
an older generation.

But the finger moves
across the wall,
marking the tests
which will determine
our fate:

breasts
cervix
skin

We wait for results
and wonder when
we became old enough
to be malignant.

(From Bodies of Glass, Aerial Publishing, 2004)

Gregor Rohrig - Urban Siesta

PHILLIPPA YAA DE VILLIERS

Home drenched
We South Africans rarely
discuss the weather.
Temperature, yes, the highs and lows
of daily fluctuations, talked out in seams of
exhaled complaints. But not
the weather.
Its ordinary wisdom is never analyzed.
We are trained by the glib
sunshine
to forgive too easily, we slide into optimism
as into well-fitting trouser.

So when the storm comes we don’t have an umbrella.

And it comes unexpectedly: we admire the mass movement
of the stately cumulus, their darkening
from cream to
bilious purple pent-up rage.
Snake-tongue lightning licking the rooftops
streets awash with revenge
cars skidding over the unstable firmament
hail hurled in furious stones.

We are terminally surprised
when we get home,
drenched. I had no idea, we say
that you were so angry.

Jozi parks
Smashed beer bottles don’t give a damn
about barefoot children. Adults, swollen
with disappointment, sit sadly in the swings.
They’ve got their own problems: they are empty now
and useless; most of the time, shattered and discarded.
Children come uninvited, so let them cut their feet:
we all learn through pain. We were the same.
They’ll grow up make the same mistakes
that we did again.
Our parents also saved up and bought us shoes
and still we limp home.

Mandy Mitchell - River Crossing

FIONA ZERBST

Poems don’t matter that much
Poems don’t matter
that much. Language
hooks itself, a fish, to a stray line
hooked on a rock, accidentally.

Look. Gutted because that line
was there in the first place,
taut, abandoned,
finished, messy, after-the-fact.

Poems. They come
only after you’ve tried for something.

The stagnant river

- for Raymond Carver

Have a look at the river
some time. Heavy and green,
gone swamp-like, thick
with algae. If you stand here, soon
you’ll hear a fish jump.

Then the rump
of green-wet rock will dumb
again, the willows
hang. It’s like a painting.
Nothing moves. Until it does.

Unless it was
your eye which leapt
along a line, discovering
an unseen colour, fish
turned over, numb, but living.

Was it like that?
Keep on watching.

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Incwadi

A Journal of South African poetry and photography

Spring 2010

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