Aniseed rusks

Oh, that sweet spiciness,
suggesting a loving, orderly house
centred in its kitchen.

Good on a plate, yes, but always
best taken from a loved hand—
the trusted hand of someone who loves you
without conditions.

I can still taste the brittleness of them:
the way they melt in the mouth, unlike anything else
I’ve ever tasted;
that spiciness, until you can believe
that the whole world might be edible after all.

That fragrance, that taste still takes me back
to the stoep of the holiday house in Margate
that was ours for such a short time, when I was eleven or twelve.
Those treats made by a very favourite aunt

before the family was broken, before I’d seen
through to the terrible fear of the other,
the blind prejudice against so much
barred from the kitchen, against those
not offered a seat at the family table.

 - Jacques Coetzee

Moonbathing

The luminary unspools her silver,
cools my thoughts,
laving, fortifying
my weakened soul.

– Silke Heiss, 22nd May 2024

Katharsis

When we’d turned away from the maudlin guests
at the family reunion, my companion said:
“I don’t approve of this much drinking.
They will wake up tomorrow morning
and feel undignified, embarrassed. This isn’t
catharsis, though I know you disagree.”

All I could do was shrug my shoulders. In the next room,
the old ladies drank their glasses down,
told their grief endlessly, like worry beads;
showed the wounds, the scars, the helplessness
they’d never shown even to each other
while their watchful husbands were alive.

 - Jacques Coetzee

Four short poems 

Luminous companion, she climbs
through his window,
finds him on the stairs,
his mind besieged
by familiar shadows.

***

He begins drowning.
She cannot save

either of them:
there are no more

lifeboat-shaped words
to hold onto.

***

The hot clothes in the drier
embrace and let go –
he can’t remember when it was
they were still together.

***

The gulf, unchanged, unchanging,
between the shoreline of the present –
and the horizon of what once was,
might have been.

- Eduard Burle

Extract from “Dear S, I am trying not to follow you”

   to be alone
is to hear the true state of my mind
its thoughts that pour
to plead with myself to be better
to beg myself to open the windows
to switch back on the lights
i am rotting inside this body
and to be alone is to smell
what I have become
to feel the emptiness trying to escape
to see me without you
to see my fate decided without me
to see our children without you
to see them look for you and know
they will never find you
to close my eyes
and try to crawl back into my mother’s womb
and remember who i was before this place

 - Qhali

Strelitzia at night

Lifts her sharp chin and ears,
anticipates the moon
rise over the sea,
which she hasn’t seen.

Hopes, perhaps, to have its music
beamed to her,
by her by now somewhat oblong
friend.

– Silke Heiss, 28th May 2024

These hands

So what will you do with them, these hands of yours,
when the beloved has left the room?
They lie in your lap – so large, so helpless, so strange —
as if they belonged to another. You raise them,

as if to make some large gesture, to point
towards some object beyond the horizon, and say:
“This is what it means when it all comes down to it.
This is what it really means.” Instead of which

you drop them again, because you know
that the connection is broken – the thread
that invisibly linked you to her body.

When the beloved has left the room, when the bank
has broken, when the ship has sailed –
you let your hands fall back into your lap
and you learn to sit very still, your gaze
turned inwards; your voice, for the moment,
dried up; your mind on pause,
waiting for the dam to burst,
for the poems to emerge in the place where she used to stand.

 - Jacques Coetzee

Near-Eden

Above grass, scrub and sand,
above telephone poles and fences –
shapes that mass
and diverge in the air.
Some white as ice, mushrooming
in the sun; others dark
or fiery, with lilac
underbellies, or possessing
long tendrils like wandering feet.

Travellers, we watch
how between rain and sheets
of spun cloud,
the light finds its way through –
revealing a sky
eggshell or canary blue over here;
mauve or purplish blue over there.

So close above us, above miles and miles
of scrub and grass;
above telephone wires and fences,
shapes that merge, unravel,
return to the formlessness
from which they arose.

An ancient river in our bodies
answers to such purity,
a purity before which, if they exist,
the gods would stop, would consent
to be extinguished,
just to bear witness as we do now –
drinking in, between horizon
and horizon – a sky remaking itself, endlessly.

- Eduard Burle

Nyad

as Diana Nyad op 64 vir

53 ure lank kon swem oor

177 kilometers in
die donker en wilde oseaan
dan kan ek vir 'n skamele uur lank sit en digkuns skryf
deur die waters van my selfvertroue en verbeelding
sal ek swem

fokkit dink daaraan
53 ure
nie slaap
nie eet
net swem

tog, dink ek wat Nyad gedoen het

is baie meer moontlik
as sit en skryf vir 53 ure lank

mens is nader aan vis-wees
as aan sit-en-skrywer-wees
swem, skop, vorentoe beur is
veel meer natuurlik as
sit en skryf
- wat 'n krampagtige, verwronge posisie om
in te leef en te oorleef!

swem, lara, swem!

- Lara Kirsten

Three short poems

She inched her way
into the warm translucent
water, until it encircled
her waist, its hands
caressing her.

She dived beneath
the water’s trembling surface and,
rising once more, swam –
swam into the arms of the sea,
her lover.

***

Her body uncoils
and greets
water’s surface
almost noiselessly –
diver.

***

 
She pivots and glides, describes
in her movements,
a flight from
and a striving towards –
dancer.

- Eduard Burle

dis genoeg gevra van 'n gedig

ek het jare terug geskryf oor hoe ek wag vir
die Groot Gedig om sy verskyning te maak
- en ek wag nogsteeds!

nou wat ek terugdink aan daai gedig
besef ek wel hoeveel klein Grootmoedige Gedigte ek
sedertdien geskryf het
verse wat nie noodwendig sosiale, ekologiese
en politiese grense verskuif nie
maar verse wat wel vonke in my murg skiet

die Groot Gedig mag my nog ontwyk
maar vir nou skaar ek my by my klein Groothartige Verse
met hulle in my mond
word my voeteval
verkwik met 'n waaghalsige elegansie

- en dis genoeg gevra van 'n gedig
- groot of klein!

 - Lara Kirsten

He wakes

i.

He wakes to the sight
of a vast plain of water, a curved blue horizon.
He wakes to a presence
sustaining itself, the lives
within its salt-filled embrace.
He wakes to the resilience
of the unsleeping sea.

ii.

He wakes to the silent river of his blood,
to a directive from his bladder.
He wakes to the sound of the cat
devouring her breakfast in the kitchen.
He wakes, not to the alarm on his phone,
but to time’s incessant ticking.

iii.

He wakes to the day’s tasks.
He wakes to the heart’s endless lessons,
to traps and routines.
He wakes and knows that he is stuck,
that desire and clarity again lie
behind a veil.
He wakes, must begin
at the beginning – the only port
from which he can set sail.

 - Eduard Burle

THRESHOLD

I step out of the car like a man who knows
his own mind, a man who has learned
how to frame words in a sentence,
how to draw the circle of power around himself
and not to step over it into disarray.

I take one step inside your door—and immediately
begin to come undone without a sound.
If I must fall, then let me fall
like a man who knows just enough to be quite certain
that he’s a fool; that words fall short
of the mark, unable now to say
anything worth repeating, and what does it matter?

I have given myself twenty minutes to offer yet again
my unconditional surrender
in the face of this wave, carrying me
across your threshold and into the unknown.

 - Jacques Coetzee

Dear Joanne

How can a human get used to grief?
I’ve found grief to be
forever the stranger,
pointing ways to walk
that are unfamiliar
to nose and heart and feet,
pulling nerves like fine wires,
singing plaints,
through tissues, organs,
hurting and continuing
to stretch the subtle body,
sometimes seemingly beyond its elasticity.

Does grief teach
the ability not to be whole,
does it take a person that far
into incompleteness?

I think so. And then also
that is where love hides.

It ambushes you, warm arms
are suddenly around you,
won’t let you go, tease, play
with your alive surprise
and yes-no-yes laughter.

Such a mystery is grief,
we dance in ways
we never knew the body could.

Sending you lots of love. 

          4.1.2024 Robert Hichens’ birthday and nearly 10 years since he died.

 - Silke Heiss

SMALL MIRACLE

(after Guy Davenport)

Some time in the 1950s,
during a visit from Tom Eliot
to St Elizabeth’s Asylum,
where he’d been confined instead of standing trial for treason,

Ezra Pound—who had sought to command
presidents, reform governments
in accordance with the dictates of his will,
ranting at the entire world, insisting it should change—

put up his feet on a table
in a small room in a long, dim corridor
(Tom Eliot did the same) so as to make enough room
for one of the inmates, his name lost to history,
to manoeuvre an imaginary
vacuum cleaner.

 - Jacques Coetzee

She wishes you a happy birthday
(after a black harrier swoops across in front of her car)
for Jacques

Had I the black harrier on my hand,
that sharp-eyed, sharp-clawed, sharp-beaked bird,
I’d let him fly, in front of you,
for you to hear his clap of wings,
perhaps a haunting cry.

But I, being me, have only this poem,
which I send you per voice clip,
for you to dance and hum into.

4th December 2023

- Silke Heiss

FLOWERS FOR WINTER

“Ah, where will I find flowers
come winter…”— Friedrich Hölderlin

There’s a cold hand round my heart as I write to you,
even though it’s still high summer in this room;
even though you are the one
for whom I swore to forsake all others.

Everyone knows you turned me out of the house we shared,
summoned your lackeys, signed the papers
and cut me loose like an unprofitable servant.

(Who would I have to become, what voice
would I have to assume, before
I could make poems out of those battering days,
when you had absolute power to hurt, and used it?)

And then, on the day I finally faced you again,
when I closed the passenger door of the uber car
that would take me away from you, wherever the hell I wanted,
away from the narrow room you’d chosen,
I slowly began to see: it was my hunger
for experience, for more life
that finally hurt you into malice.
You must have seen my hands were finally empty,
that they could find no flowers for you anymore
now winter had finally claimed you, claimed our house.
And so you turned me out of doors,
possessed, perhaps, by some ghost
of your old generosity—

knowing I would smell my way,
sooner or later, to a place
where the seasons still turned, where spring
was still possible.

 - Jacques Coetzee

Beyond language
for Ed

When my forehead surrenders,
puts itself against your shoulder,
you turn away in your sleep,
and my neck angles strangely,
but the discomfort does not matter,
it’s the contact that counts.

I plug myself into you
and good happens –
a wordless, explanationless,
self-evident,
simple
yes of peace.

My thoughts dissolve
into your skin, my woman intuition
streams
into the gleam
of your ripening genius. Something along
those lines.

The rain, which has been massaging
our roof, pounds louder.

 - Silke Heiss

AT PIRATES BAR AND GRILLE, PLUMSTEAD

Half past midnight already, and whatever
critical faculties he ever had
have long deserted him. These past few months he has learned
to be glad of the disco shlock
that pours into the room from the loudspeakers:
Gloria Gaynor vowing for all of us
that she’s indestructible, can survive anything;
Abba’s promise that we’ll sing like we did before.

Last year he would have hunched his shoulders, scowled
at the production values of such sweetened fare.
Now, with the old heartache finally behind him,
he is ready to swallow it all down—
the glamour, the reaching out for new horizons,
for desire that has forgotten the blinding rage
twisting its face.

Now Whitney Houston is belting out again
that she wants to dance, to feel the heat
with somebody who loves her, and all he can do
is swallow back tears of gratitude for this
rough magic, still somehow accessible
even now; for the disaster
that shattered him into pieces
just in time.

 - Jacques Coetzee

Wink
for Nia Outis

     i.
Words ripple in on the wind,
on the water,
pools are clearer
than a brooding heart.

     ii.
Far, far on the eastern horizon
is a shy wink of silver
on the sky-clouded sea.

 - Silke Heiss