Steam

All through the dark

insomnia and night fears

I’d hear the knock and hiss

and clack of the steam trains

as they’d shunt and chuff

between the station and North End,

or the narrow gauge down south

whistle her running steam – the Apple Express

from the Langkloof,

as through my dark of mind-hurt

there’d come clicking on the night breeze

and a sudden clatter of tracks,

syncopated with the heart beats

of child panic into the dead

of the darkness

till the bells tolled thrice

at the Dutch Reformed Church,

and my head would twist

on the pillow of necessity,

and I’d think to bash my living skull

against the wall to shut up

the sounds and the thoughts

and to shove – like steam forced

into strength – hot sleep into being.

 - Brian Walter

All night

I’ve read all night, and now dawn

rolls grey to the east, with little sound

this hour to disquieten me,

only the last whispers of rain

or eavesdroppings of artless thought.

I have renounced all hope of sleep.

She’s a strange mistress, Insomnia.

It is still, and twilit quiet, and I’m lost

in her arms, reading this restless time

away, away back to the old Egyptians,

remembering their first creation mound

and that earliest light. I am so far back

in mind, so lost in the seeps of rain,

that I almost miss the clockwork

of the awakening rhythms: the jet thrust

of the early flight, the trucks and traffic

along Buffelsfontein Road,

the mind-made worlds of profit and loss,

and the timetables they strive to keep.

 - Brian Walter

Walkway

The sudden green of the walkway

tumbles up in reaching leaves

and autumn flashes amidst the dark shades:

but splashed across the pavement

damp litter is speckled and spattered.

Old plastic Satan has fled this way

shedding scales of dirt and dollops

of body-filth, damp with bad breath,

and the soil is flecked with dead

and discarded plastic; white hues

of promised purity; and streaked

with the yellows, reds and blues

of the old wrappings of idle shoppers.

Litter sleeps filthily upon the earth,

breeding.

And schoolchildren amble by,

hands in pockets, beanies pulled   

low against the wintering sky,

walking the path between

the living green

and profane carelessness,

the long path of the shadow

of death.

 - Brian Walter 

She Dreams

The soul comes to consciousness in a great

cavern of space; a column

at her back, knobbed and ridged, all the way up.

Horizontal ledges left and right, like scaffolding, leading up.

Above, to left and right, two dim tunnels

leading off. And below her, two more, moving downwards.

And she is sitting here, in this cool silence, and looks to see

what she is. Naked and little.

A foundling in a cave,

back up against the column, looking up, and around.

She’s agile enough to scramble everywhere-along the jointed tunnels,

in all four directions, to their very endings, even,

where her world ends. She learns

how to wriggle into even these terminal places,

where she can feel something of everything that is beyond her;

touch some of its movings, ponder its messages.

The frail light she wanders in must come from somewhere above;

so up the scaffolding. Then this vertical shaft,

this stem, into a smooth gourd, a round hollow,

gleaming like the inside of a pearl.

And with windows!

Warm stuff, full of light, flooding in, which sets her

quivering like a tuning fork-

and her world shivers into being, too.

 - John van Wyngaard

graça

            in memory of Norman Morrissey

your bedside lamp
made sommer with an 
empty graça-bottle  ̶

the etiquette still in tact

my eyes linger on the subtitle
casa de ouro
house of gold

yes! i shout
gold is this house
which flows with
music and poetry
tea and honey

(mumbling aside: one day i'll unscrew
the bottle-stand,
fill 'er up with
your favourite drink,
screw it fast again
and flick the switch!
the heat will suffuse your bedroom
with intoxicated light
you'll get graciously drunk
without having a single sip!)

 - Lara Kirsten

Yet to notice

The zoologists say
they don't know
about the mating ritual
of the Olive thrush, but

it's always the male who leads,
and there are definitely no pheromones, and
if they were making the same gestures
it could well have been two males
disputing
territory.

And I ask myself
whether I stand charged
as guilty
of anthropormorphising
when I surmise

that even a lady Olive thrush
can be so uniquely motivated
as to take initiative,
to say, here, let me show you -
this is where
I'd like our nest;

her partner not put out
by her gentle feminism -

which she may well have copied
from observing the animal
I am - the one the zoologists
have yet to notice.

- Silke Heiss, 29th October 2018