Maverick Life
Unlocked: Poems for Critical Times (Series Two, Part Nine)
In times of uncertainty, many readers turn to poetry, seeking not just consolation but clarity. “Unlocked: Poems for Critical Times” brings South African poems to those facing the isolation, confusion and unease engendered by the Covid-19 pandemic.
Editors’ note to readers: The automated sound device that accompanies articles in the Daily Maverick is to assist readers who are blind or have reading difficulties. It is not designed for poetry. Where possible, we advise you to read the poems rather than listen.
This is my final feature for “Unlocked: poems for critical times.”
Since just after lockdown, more than 50 poems by South African poets have appeared in 18 features, accompanied by the visual images of many artists. It has been a pleasure and honour to source the work, but difficult too, as by no means all the poems I admire and thought appropriate could be included.
I thank the poets and artists, publishers and galleries who gave permission to reproduce work, sometimes with very short notice. My special gratitude to Antjie Krog for her generous assistance. Thank you to Mark Heywood, poet and editor of Maverick Citizen, who responded warmly to my proposal for the series and supported and advised me in numerous ways; thanks to Emilie Gambade, editor of Maverick Life, for facilitating the process.
The formidable Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva wrote that “a comet’s path/is the path of poets” and elsewhere that poets when asleep “discover/the flower’s formula, the star’s law.” She also said that every poem is “a love-child”, “laid at the wind’s/mercy, at the wheels’ rut.”
I hope you engaged with the love-children I found, that they yielded clarity, confrontation or comfort, and that you appreciated both the burden and beauty of words and the spaces between words.
The poems below, whether by quiddity, grace or sobriety, celebrate the natural, material and relational world. They return, to our sometimes faltering attention, the preciousness as well as the precariousness of the everyday.
Robert Berold’s “Praise Poem” enumerates the quixotic profundity of apparently unconnected phenomena and processes. From “all tumbling/feelings” to “helium” and “the seabird’s clavicle”, from “silver dunes” to “gooseflesh”, the subjects of the speaker’s observations are united in a word waterfall of gratitude.
“My Mother’s Laughter” by the late Chris van Wyk speaks to us with his characteristic narrative verve and tenderness. Like the prisms caught in his marbles, he describes how his mother’s laughter also captured the sun of his childhood, and drew everyone into her generative orbit. Her laughter offers a taste of “citrus mirth, deciduous pleasure. Evergreen.”
In Mark Heywood’s “Of Ducks and Dusk” the speaker observes with reflective wonder the regular evening return of ducks and their departure again each morning, comparing it with the daily human commute. The poem pleads with us to “protect” nature’s “unknown electricity” and cherish the connections that make “our impermanence glow.”
It is with special pleasure I reprint Nunke Khadimo’s poem “//Aeku”, which praises the numinous eland, the respectful relation between human and animal, and the desire for transformative experience. Composed orally in Khwedam, the language of the Khwe people, it was translated by Nunke Khadimo and Antjie Krog into Afrikaans some years ago. Thereafter the transcription of the original was written down by Tomsen Nore in an orthography that has only recently been devised. Nunke Khadimo’s poem and Antjie Krog’s translation into English appear below.
I conclude with “Kalahari Campsite, a short poem of my own, as a farewell.
***
Praise Poem
By Robert Berold
for pollen,
wet ferns,
sturdy insects,
for all tumbling
feelings,
for cool shale,
for layers of sea,
for fire,
for renewal,
for helium,
for blue plumbago,
rock cuttings
and railways
balancing on rivers,
for ball bearings,
for the seabird’s clavicle,
for the benzene key
opening carbon’s
lock to life,
for stone mulches,
for the mind of earth:
inscriptions of rosy succulents,
lettering of spiral flowers,
for the oxbow turn
on the Fish River,
for hungry bacteria,
for silver dunes,
for sudden mist,
for gooseflesh.
From The Door to the River, Bataleur Press, 1984
***
My Mother’s Laughter
By Chris van Wyk
When I think of my mother’s laughter
and how it rang through my childhood
I search for a way to bring it to you
and the nearest analogy of those
sounds that slaughtered the sadness
is this:
When I loosened the string
that choked my bag of marbles
and threw them onto the earth
they captured the sun in their prisms
even as they ran free
and transformed their little windows of light
into coins that I squandered on joy
with all my friends.
On Sundays my mother’s laughter
swept the sombre crosses
off the shoulders of the churchgoers
flung us into the streets
with our white shirts pockmarked
with the talismans of tomato sauce
and the brooches of beetroot.
My mother’s sheer laughter
filled the afternoon cheering football fields
flew through the nets of the goalposts
and the bags of the whistling orange vendors.
Throughout her life my mother laughed
as she still does today
and even though there was much to cry about
as there is even now
so seldom does she weep
that I am forced to put her tears in parentheses.
My mother’s laughter grows out of our house
and people come to taste it.
Citrus mirth, deciduous pleasure. Evergreen.
My mother’s laughter runs in the family.
From My Mother’s Laughter: Selected Poems, forthcoming from Deep South later this year.
***
Of Ducks and Dusk
Each night, as far as I know, the ducks return
Taking their signal from the slant of the sun
They wing in from the east, riding the dusk
In groups of twenty, they circle,
Each lap slightly lower, as if tracing the shadows of the fading sun,
So that you can hear the beat of their wings,
Feel the effort to battle with gravity (like cats with wings)
Then brake and drop, suddenly lost in the arrival of dark.
The tide’s global sweep has pushed away the light
Now only a meaningless chatter, who says what and why
I cannot know, neither do I know their journey’s origin
Or whether, when or where-to they will depart in the morning.
These things I have not observed, or looked for.
I know the day’s routine that blinds us,
The shunt to the city
As the sun’s first waves poke light back to being
Triggering a million small unseen actions that make a whole,
A society, an economy,
Each part feeling alone
Rarely conscious of the connections that make the merry go round
Go round and round and round.
Viewed from above, this river of shiny, insulated humanity
This habit-driven surge to office or factory or home
The taking up of tools, the drive of the hours, most actions a rebound
Each acting out what it thinks is its part,
Seems as inexplicable, as unconscious, as the ducks,
But devoid of its beauty. These things I am part of.
Standing alone, soon too to be engulfed by the dusk
I am just an object of nature, a rock or a tree
I do not interrupt or intrude, my thoughts have no motion
Do not break the air like a stone, or the silence like a shout
But all the worlds are alive and warring in my mind
The ducks make me think of the need to slow down, depart the race,
Protect that unknown electricity
That makes us capable of thought and feeling and observation.
Life is too short to forget that the sun sets every night
And, as it does, makes theatre
That a vast array of lights shuffle onto the night stage when the blue or grey departs
And shine down through our transience,
Making our impermanence glow.
From I write what I fight: Poems, Echo Press, 2016
***
//Aeku
Nunke Khadimo (written down by Tomsen Nore)
Dù ce, Ti mûûate /oadi goro a
/Eu/gâ de yi a nu kyao-n/uu di doa a.
Tamaxa hambe axodjika ti hîxo a.
Ti xa a n/am
Ti xa a n/am
Ti mûûate ‡òm a, ngyecan dù ce, nu /àm ma.
Ti mûûate /oroyi a nu xuara a.
Tamaxa hambe axodjika ti hîxo a.
Ti /uxucicâ kyàte dù ce
N‡u. //’am. Kyâô. /am
Ti ao tââkhwe a
Ti kyâî ‡àò khyehexo ng’û ki tîî djiki.
Ngyecan //avandundu /’ée-ào ndja
Ndeutâ t’onkara xa a n‡omhî
N‡u. //’am. Kyâô. /am
Ti xa a n/am
Ti xa a n/am
Ti /x’an kyâî ‡àò n/iki djaoma a, dù ce
Ti mûûate //ge//gam a nu //x’euci ‡xei khovo a.
N‡u. //’am. Kyâô. /am
N‡u. //’am. Kyâô. /am
Yoxa a ti n//acâ kyatexohe. ti /uxucicâ kyàte, dù ce
Ti /uxucicâ kyàte
***
conversation
Nunke Khadimo
Translated from Afrikaans by Antjie Krog
eland, I see a blue sky
a bigleave tree and tall bushmangrass
I can do nothing with it
I care for you
I care for you
I see a baobab, oh dear eland, and the sun. I see
wild rosemary and a pied crow. I cannot do nothing with it
I want to be something else, eland
sit. click. close. two
I am scared of strangers
I am glad for all the thing(e) on earth
oh Tablemountain in the south
how beautifully you have been made are you created
sit. clap. close. two
I care for you
I care for you
I am glad to work here, eland
I see buffalo thorn and a speckled pigeon
sit. clap. close. two
sit. clap. close. two
I can only say that I want to be something else, eland. I want to be something else
First published in Wasafiri, Issue 86: Summer 2016
***
Kalahari Campsite
By Ingrid de Kok
In the Kalahari night we wonder at stars –
above us so far, so many, all indelible –
we think we’re underneath them, they’re in space and time
beyond us, we’re small and fleshy and they are adamantine
but then immediately it’s raining stars, it’s shooting stars
the whole world is stars and nothing else
desert dunes, red sand, wild cats on killing raids
brown-backed hyena at the fire’s burnt remains
an owl’s alarm call, the pattern of ants across stone
they’re all stars, and we too are stars
we glitter, we rotate, we fall away
we are nothing, there is nothing, but stars.
From Seasonal Fires; New and Selected Poems, Umuzi and Seven Stories Press, 2006.
DM/MC/ML