Phosphorescence

1
Poems –
postcards dispatched into a future
where we are not;
mementos of moments
both found and lost.

2
In forgotten poems he revisits
gestures towards wholeness.

3
Trawling the harbours
of yesterday’s words, he discovers
rotting wood, sunken
chaos, the glow
of phosphorescence.

4
What journeys lie ahead,
still call to him,
in forests and rivers of poems?

5
Words –
the glint of scales
in the mind’s dark caves.

- Eduard Burle

Meditation 1

Serenity of stone,
dry at last after the deluge.
Dry blood colour,
kingfisher home.

Kingfisher hovers,
plummets, wallops fish
and swallows.
The bare bones of a poem follow.

The truth is not a shadow,
but the sun throws its outlines down.
No significance, just motion
of pen and pages in the wind,
the trembling shadow
of the hat-band flying away
from under my throat.

– Silke Heiss

Excerpts from a writer’s museum

i

This apartment, now a museum,
once the place in which he’d lived
with family, but privately,
and interrogated his existence,
and written copiously.
Here, only the shutters and window-frames
and the street beyond them
bore witness to how he worked
and smoked and seldom slept,
his various selves mutating, conversing,
each having emerged
intact, fully-formed, from the rooms
of another world inside him.

ii

In death, as in life, his person
almost an abstraction, he’s pacing
the corridor, pausing to read
through steel-rimmed spectacles
the handwriting – fluid, once his –
on the open page of the notebook
inside the display cabinet:

The barest trace of a smile, thin and sad,
at the compelling absurdity
of an argument he’s already forgotten
and ceased, by now, to care about.

iii

By now the tourists, the devout,
the merely curious, have left.

The dark-eyed receptionist looks up,
returns to tidying her desk:
She doesn’t see him – or if she does –
she’s grown quite used to him.

Something in her smile, her quiet
demeanour, reminds him of a love
he knew only fleetingly.

iv

After she’s left,
he hears the sound of her footsteps
disappearing with the shape
of her aura down the cobbled streets.

Lighting, out of habit, another
cigarette, he’s there, as before,
in the dust-particled air
of his former solitude.

But something is troubling him, lately,
something in the smile
of the dark-eyed receptionist.
Had he been mistaken
while among the living,
to trade love or its possibility,
for a life of solitude and reflection?

The fruits of such a life:
unfinished texts and papers
from a trunk full of writing, the puzzle
of his discrete identities,
now mapped out around him
like innumerable constellations,
luminous fragments of all he dreamed into being.

 - Eduard Burle

Hiku Hikers

Pens scurry over the pages,
accompanied by the boubou’s call
in the almost too cool forest on the dune,
where Estie had to scurry
shivering into a spot of sun.

Dappled light
witnesses the humans,
their creative flames licking,
leaping onto the paper,
burning it not.

– Silke Heiss

The lovers in the park

She lies above him, sky
to his earth, their faces close.

Beneath the spread limbs
of branches, the curtain
of the leaves,

they taste the nectar
of their kisses;
feel their touching
through garments.

Where they lie, the vision
of ancestors,
locked in the rhythm
of their coupling; breathing in
the untamed air

of a time
before clothing, before parks.

- Eduard Burle

Imprint

    i.
Two umber-pelted rams
gallop in parallel –
one on each side of the road.
My car rolls between them.

My blue metal steed slows right down,
as their spiralling horns,
their starry thighs and crested spines,
their taut, violin-bow legs leap by.

    ii.
Hands on the steering wheel,
heading towards town,
my head turns and notices
a crow on a bridge railing.
His beak is open, holding something, food –
or is it a phrase, for me to speak,
a promise from the future,
which the oyster-coloured waters
are still smoothing over?

    iii.
What do I do
with the language
of life, imprinting
its alphabet of blood and flesh
into mine, so they mesh?

    iv.
I write it down.
A new old way of seeing.
Oh, to be a star
on a thigh, and be warm
with brightest being.

– Silke Heiss

Blue sky over Barcelona

The first thing you see
on ascending the stairs leading out of the metro
is the blue sky over Barcelona –

sky that is rinsed in the dark blue face
of the sea, sky that touches
the sleeping branches of trees, the coloured spirals
of the Sagrada Familia.

Your heart is hungry, in search of a dream,
your heart is weary, emptied of dreams.

Sun today, that finds your skin,
pours its radiance over the city.

This voice that is yours, that is
someone else’s
(someone you’re yet to be, are becoming).

Whatever it is you’re looking for
isn’t to be found here,

but for now you are here, and for now
nothing is clear except for
the blue sky over Barcelona.

 - Eduard Burle

New moon night

A chosen man’s breath
on my arm,
frogs and cicadas quiet.

- Silke Heiss, 30 January 2025


Sunshine poem
For Ed and Jacques

Little, legless braai-stand-not,
seated on broken bricks,
weighted with drizzle-infused ash,

beside a blue wheelbarrow
filling up with water,
while waiting for the sunshine
of its very own poem.

 - Silke Heiss, 19 December 2024

ag nee, geitjies sterf ook

ek maak my venster oop

en op die vensterbank val
'n piepklein geitjie
                            gekwes

hy het seker in 'n gleufie skuiling gevind
en toe ek hierdie oomblik kies
om die venster oop te maak
                             knyp
die raam deur
sy dun lyfie
etlike lewenstrillings flits deur sy selle
en skielik net so stil
net so
                            dood

sy lyfie so weerloos en klein
my skrik so bitter en groot
alle klammigheid in my mond verdwyn
my oë dartel wild oor die kortstondige lewensboog
waarin hierdie brose wesentjie in
hierdie klein hoekie
van die aardbol gestraal het

'n halfuur later kom ek terug
om seker te maak die geitjie is nog daar
en dalk wonderbaarlik weer opgestaan het

                          maar nee
'n hele spul reuse miere
oortrek sy lyfie en
                         verlustig
hulself aan alles wat
hom eens laat beweeg het

die skok trek my platter
hoe gou so polsende kleinood
                         oplos tot in
die onpolsende
                         niet

 - Lara Kirsten

Stone-people prayer

Two rocks, in reverence,
eyes closed, necks bowed,
fists held close in prayer,
facing golden sand,
the long evening rays flocking
towards their lack of feet,
their statued selves,
stuck here,
solid in their thanks.

 -  Silke Heiss, 20 January 2025

stil lewe

ek het weer so siek geword in my longe

slapelose nagte
verstarde en moeë dae
bolyf en borskas so seer

vandag so laagtepunt bereik
geen fisieke of kop krag

ek sien niks veel raak nie
ek is in so sieke dwaal
dit wat ek wel sien lyk faal

      maar
daar was
een     enkele
objek
wat my aandag verwonderd vasgehou het:

'n leë
consol
glas pot

die manier hoe sy net daar so     geruisloos
in die oggendlig staan en      blink in
haar glassigste glassigheid

ek sit op die vloer en bly kyk en kyk na haar
'n eenvoudige glas pot

ek hoef nie eens aan haar te vat nie
sy is werkliker as werklik
meer betroubaar as my hart en my kop
sy die hoopvolste stil lewe in
my bestaan vandag

die poëtiese misterie:
hoe verruk ek staan teenoor
hierdie
     harde
         helder
              deursigtige
passieloosheid van glas

 - Lara Kirsten

Mentoring
for Nasru-Dee

The great trees at the bottom of his garden,
sentinels of these seminal hours,
rooting a human soul into community
by means of letters sounding out
alphabets far, far beyond Babel.

The only towers here are the pine,
the poplar, the spruce, planted for love of shade,
thriving in a vale where the decades raised them
to stand tall.

They talk, crawl, with all the time in the world
through the cadences of a love poem,
add words slowly, change them around,
insert the musical notation of punctuation,

and he drinks the mystic tuition
he’s effortlessly drawing out of her,
while she floats in an element so watery and airy,
so near the happy sun, yet barefoot on the earth,
she hardly recognises herself,
the sureness of her voice,
as if it’s always been here, this oneness,
meditating and conceiving
an evergreen sap of being

here, here where their voices mingle with their thoughts,
shared for now, and always,
bringing forth his art
by a magical midwifery
that leaves them both
reverent and humbled.

Silke Heiss, 18 January 2025

in sy oë

        dit is koud vanaand in kaapstad 

die bedelaar soek 'n stuk warmte in
sy kartonbed
sy mond is hard soos
die betonmure
wat oral
om
hom
oprys
maar in sy oë
sien ek iets van sy siel skyn soos
'n perdeblom wat
deur
die krake
breek

in his eyes

        it is cold this night in cape town
the beggar hungers for a piece of warmth
in his cardboard bed
his mouth is hard like
the concrete walls
that
rises
all
around
him
but in his eyes
i see something of his soul shine out
like a dandelion
breaking
through
the cracks

 - Lara Kirsten

Step to the bridge

You step to the bridge
to say good-bye to the
Drakensberg lily in flower.

One bloom’s wilted on the cluster,
four are open to the sun,
four buds still nestling.
Their fullness I’ll likely not see,
as they’ll probably be done on my return.

I turn to go, when suddenly a body
of fragrance
circles my face, anointing
my awareness. I stop,
step down, obedient, from the planks
into the leaf-mould, soft, dark soil
and put my nose between
the white stamens dancing
in the rosy trumpet
of petals. Inhale and hear
in the odour the sweetness of a language
I’m given to compose
in this moment reaching over
between two species, lines that arc
from lily heart to human heart,
one beating, both brimming
with living relatedness.

 - Silke Heiss, 14 January 2025

Extracts from a runner’s notebook ii

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