Extracts from a runner’s notebook 

i.

A runner and his shadow
move through the forest;

he is each slender tree
which remains rooted
in the earth;

he is each loosened leaf
which, in readiness,
falls to the ground.

   ii.

In the great lung of the forest,
a man is running.

In the silence, when light
filters down through the trees
like smoke,

he can breathe, feel as one.

In the vast maze of the forest
a man feels the ground
beneath his feet,

the texture of the ground
with nothing intervening,

knows he cannot escape
from the earth where he runs.

   iii.

He is running uphill
into the arms of the breeze,
he is running to reel in the miles,
he is running to keep feeling
what there still is to feel.

- Eduard Burle

Lusikisiki Lear

Once, driving to Lusikisiki from Port St John’s
we swept over a hill, and in the road there
lay a human, brown-naked, legs straight out,
arms down the side, head against the tar,
chin to the heavens: dignified, and bare,
placed along the centre white-line.
Christ, you called, seeing as we passed
the woman, old and thin and stiff, like death.
Leave her, she’s mad: always does such things,
our isi-Xhosa companion said. But her form
was so fine, humanly, evocative, an image
of our deep core human self that we clothe off,
socialize away, philosophize out: and yet,
with her humble media of body and self,
she had the instinct — or deep talent, rather —
for installation art, some mirror demand
for self-reflection, an awareness of each itinerant
spectator: a shrewd sense of our common drama.

 - Brian Walter

Four short poems 

   i.

Words and idioms –
stones skimmed across
the lake of the mind.

   ii.

His mind, like a gazelle,
leaps nimbly between ideas.

   iii.

He returns to what will outlast him:

the shadowed outline
of a mountain;

the surf’s insistent refrain;

the stars bedded in their dark quilt
above the Atlantic.

   iv.

He is drawn to the idea of the beloved.
That day – if it comes –
when the pull of such a notion
becomes more than an idea.

- Eduard Burle

Save

The moon’s turned golden
as she’s climbed higher,
above the pounding of the waves.

The palms are still,
no breath moves,
save that of my pen,
whispering over the page.

– Silke Heiss, 22nd May 2024

Lunar

Darkening in the dark
of pine trees –
twilight.

   *

Moon, tonight you are
a sliver, a rind
of all my yesterdays.

Moon, my life sometimes loses
its shape.

   *

Boat-shaped moon
above the dark water
where do we sail tonight?

   *

Glide by, silent moon,
glimpsed through windscreen and dark trees.
You lead, I’ll follow.

- Eduard Burle

Desire

Desire to walk into the sea again, and wash clean the wounds of his mind.
Desire to learn how to listen for each fifth wave, until he grows still and forgets himself.
Desire to somersault into those waves, until the laughter rings from his belly.
Desire to dance, on beaches at dawn and under bright lights among strangers.
Desire to dance in one place, holding empty arms out in front of him.
Desire to learn to trust silence again, when there is no music at all.
Desire for the faith that life flows strong and clear through him, whether in the arms of someone or alone.

 - Jacques Coetzee

Riddle

What colour
is the crone’s womb?
Luminous milky turquoise it is,
and smooth as silk. A bag full
of magic, under her used-up
udder.

– Silke Heiss, 30th June 2024

Notes from a forest

Lichen inching its way
up the trunk of a pine tree –
the distance, unknown,
of the journey ahead.

   *

Silence –
the forest’s soundtrack
to growth and decay.

   *

Fallen leaves –
the compositions of trees.

   *

Rotting tree trunk –
food and accommodation
for a burgeoning termite population.

   *

Small bird on the wing,
minstrel of the morning –
will you return to lend your song
to that chorus, at dusk,
among the darkening branches?

- Eduard Burle

Toffee ice cream

This is to say that, when
I congratulated you the other day
for being vigilant about your intake of sugar,
I really meant it.

But for me we will probably always be
in that ice cream parlour, in a much too quiet suburb
in the days before my divorce.

I remember the flow of conversation—
all those new intimacies finding speech—
but mostly I remember the moment when
that rich, cold, clotted sweetness
insisted on spilling over the edge
of the bowl, until I lifted it
to my hungry mouth, and we both laughed,
signalling we were fine, still knew who we were.

As a child, the important thing about eating
was keeping my hands clean, or washing them
as soon as possible if all else failed.

Now here I was, my hands already sticky
with recent failure, bringing this bowl
of unearned sweetness closer to me,
to swallow one more bite
of this incorrigible,
mind-numbingly beautiful world,
and then another.

 - Jacques Coetzee

Benguela

for Alex Bozas, Brydon Bolton & Ross Campbell of Benguela

i.

Molten trio
tears at, peels back
the sky –

we fly through
black holes,

watch stars realign
and comets collide –

light and dark
ripple and bend,

come along for
the ride.

ii.

This music burns
and shudders into darkness –
its spirit
is deathless.

- Eduard Burle

  

Womb of time

New moon velvet hugs the old woman’s skin.
The night is sufficiently warm: naked she glides

her form knows where the furniture is

through luscious darkness.

The soles of her feet track
the edges of mats, carpet, wood,
to the loo, and back to bed

like a seed of desire

conversing with the hidden moon.

Her own mind and body are in hiding
from harsh humanity, who habitually blot,
delete the night with brute power.

How can they see a poem?
How deeply, darkly it is planted, by the moon,
into the very womb
of time.

– Silke Heiss 9th May 2024

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  

elke dag word my hande hergebore

met die saad van 'n oneindigende veld

van gebare

   *

die kuns van die kleine

is die strewe werd:

een klein tree

is die begin van

die duisend-myl pelgrimstog

   *

hier met die woorde

so digby my

voel ek so tuis en geanker

deel van genesing lê 

in taal

   *

speel spel

spul spaander

spat spalk

spoel spoeg

spuit sprei

sproei spog 

spruit

die woordspieëlings    

   *

drup-drup die dig-druppels

watter grond 

gaan hulle natlei 

vandag?

   *

uit die traankliere van die druppelinge

 - motreën - 

die stil ekstase van 

seëninge

 - Lara Kirsten

A dirge for Lochart
for Jen Whyle

Again, as years ago,
I heard the forest in the valley
chant – a haunting, mystic sound,
unmistakeable.
At first I thought it was humans,
so choral was the chant –
but humans can’t traverse
the thick, virgin forest there.

Then I realised the ‘Standing People’*
were offering a gift.
They chanted four or five times,
at irregular intervals.
Everything else was still,
and mist lay quietly,
veiling the valley.

And it occurs to me,
in the writing of this,
that the trees brought up through their roots,
nourished by the Tyume River,
a dirge for Lochart,
a fine man, of the good earth,
whose sudden death shook
not only the two-leggeds.

          – The Edge, 1st February 2024 (two days after Lochart died)

 - Silke Heiss


*The name given to trees by the indigenous inhabitants of America.

Dear S, who survives Inimba?

I don’t know how to un-teach our children
all the tricks I teach them sleeping.

there are many ways to die                 inside your body

I watch myself         teach them           I want to jump

but I am screaming     inside my eyes:               do not do as I do

but they are chained to me             so close.so tight

If I push them off this mountain

will they survive me?

 - Qhali

For a young woman

You come outside, and I see you
– you don’t see me, but I look at you.
My life turns right around, imagining,
turns so utterly that I’m young
again, dark of hair, and slim.
But you become lined with age
and grey with life. I watch you still,
and thank God you are what you are,
and I am I. My mind lets you be.
This is the way of things.
I smile at you. The guitarist
strums his chords, and the singer sings.

 - Brian Walter

April 15th, 2020 (a.s) - Ndiyaxhwilwa

Ndinyuquzwa zimpethu ebuchotsheni
ulusu ngumkhence
ndizikrwempa ngeenzipho ezimdaka.

Ndikhwela iindonga ezithethayo
ndibaleka abantu abangenabuso
bayandixhwiphula.
Isibane sengqondo sicimile.

 - Qhali

Group work

We wrote that picture stukkend
after every poet chose an element
so we could each gooi the writing
– the onion seller, the dark door,
the shelter, doodles on a blue wall,
peeping face, sitting woman with a doek –
composing openly and free. I said,
“What a poem we could make
should we combine our words
and shape all into one-ness –
our different strands of script
bending into verse-being . . .
Imagine what would be taught
by discussion: the disputes,
selecting which piece would open
our poem, which would follow,
which blend its being with another
to multiply meanings.” But we didn’t.
We left that task for each creative self,
for each multiplicity of mind,
to find resonance in contending thought.

 - Brian Walter

The Ecca Poets welcome their guest poet for 2024 - Qhali.

To kick-off the poetry posts for this year, here a poem by Qhali

Return to Tsolobeng

Two cubs in my hands
one with open eyes - the other asleep.
I’m placing them in my mother’s palms
tougher than mine - to shield them.
I’m going to the mountains for a while
where two old women wait for me
outside a green hut guarded by brown horses
at the top of a hidden mountain
overlooking an old river full of queens and secrets.
The two old women will only watch me as I build
with hands covered in manure to cast walls to find me
and I will sleep only to visit the elders, but I will wake
with the ones that do not speak, to save my children
from a life without rivers, and mountains, and horses,
and quiet, and land, and snow, and a mother.
I will wake each day despite the urge to stay on the other side
to build a home in Tsolobeng,
so I teach my children what is in a name,
so a life of colour is not that of complexion,
so a life of wealth is not that of the tangibles,
so that each click that comes out of my mouth
has a root with a home they can call their own.
I have been missing for a while, long before this trip.
Sometimes a mother needs to return home to be a mother
because sometimes this place can make you forget
how to be a human,
how to feed a child and be nowhere else,
how to look at a child with open eyes,
which turns you took that cut wires in you
because you are on an edge and the mind is screaming
and they are screaming, and the world is screaming
and if you say one more word, or take one more wrong turn,
whatever colourful string is holding your body together with your soul
will unravel.
I am going back to Tsolobeng
back to my ancestors’ land
where truth and sanity
wait in whispers.

 - Qhali