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