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