Children and the winter sun
       for Anastacia

Down from home to the township
to pick you up – young woman,

with life budding in your body –
in the rough end of town
where drug lords wink and kids get shot.

We drive out west, towards the Cape,
but duck inland, north towards the hills,
into the low Eastern Cape bushveld
and euphorbia valleys, into farmland –

all the way, so we can write,
can write our truck-beaten roads

from our now, back till the was
and out the Eastern Cape, till whenever.

 - Brian Walter