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