Carry on

Numb from news
– hate-speech, violence, lies,
noble essays, reasoned tries
defending values, hoping
to avert bad trouble, blues –

pained by poems
I’ve proofed
– by children and their guides
in townships under siege
by gangsters (“Satan’s servants”) –

I walk The Bluff
knowing, seeing,
but not feeling
the cliffs caressed by mist,
grey old bracken bending,
looking at their young
in bright green hoodies
coming up.

Stop.
Will I ever be
at one
with what I see
again? Grieved I stand
for loss
of me.

The mists heave lightly,
sucked by sun’s eternal thirst,
revealing slopes of trees
that never have been cursed,
the Proteas and Watsonias
hold up and shake
with flirting birds
(whose avian tongues dispel the worst)

and this
they do:
cancel me
to pull me through.

And I continued
walking.
I saw a Longcrested Eagle …
the wind flipped
through his crest
as if it were the Yellow Pages,
and there in silhouette:
he was all focused, black
and grand
and free
to look about him
there
on The Bluff;

and a little mongoose
did its delicate staccato stipple,
frittered over the path
and was gone;

and I knew
I must go on
cancelling my self
– cancel news and lands of pain –
if I want
to carry on.

                        20th November 2016

 - Silke Heiss