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