Tag Archives: poem

CART

CART

another cart
I am
   tired of carts

keep asking myself
what I am doing wrong
or right
to find myself forever
being stuck in one

pushing pulling
being pushed
being pulled

tumbil, trolley, cart
tired of them, sick of them
whatever name
to
attach
to them
in whatever language
still exists, whatever language
I have spoken

and yes it sounds poetic
sounds cool and
sounds fun

to think
first time I stand up in my cart
see the sunrise
feel the Sun

warming me
back in this life

speak whatever I need to spesk
still have to lean

cart
   around in my head re-
incarnation to reincarnation

EMILY

EMILY

I remember the day
dearly recall

stumbling upon your house
tumbling through your door
crashing
on your floor

lucky the sheaves and sheaves
scattered their to
break my fall
keep me warm
as I did sleep

and sleep I did
for a very lomg time
but time
   is, they say, relative
and what
might have seemed eons
could just
have been
a year

cocooned in that great nest
of all your best poems

and me wandering through
them all
      stanza by stanza
whole of that
dreamtime
           opening door
after door
inside room
after room

upstairs
    downstairs

curved spiral
and spine

somewhere up there
a down there
the box of legend full
of
   smell of death carriage,
bone,  zero
snake
        and sharpest of splinter
of shard
that the eye
might penetrate

this night nurse of a woman
you have smocked and
thereby
          contained

look again!
look again!

     the horror is so thick
it does not need to seep

the whole
of your continent in
usual sweet quandry, yet
one more dead mistake

PERIGEE

PERIGEE

I saw him
last day of primary school
for him
riding his bicycle,
exultant
   down that
street
in Parow

next year
high school
a big brainy
boy now

Mars
at its perigree
his head
full of
Ray Bradbury

nothing in the night sky
redder or
more relevant
than our brother
world with
its dust and its
oxides and canals
and
perennial
alien menace
(though
in Mr Bradbury’s
book it
is we
who colonize you
to our shame and
shock and
terror
(the tribes of the plains
know that
story through and
                     through)

cycling full
of joy
     leaving past
behind
for future

wonder
what come the end
of his days

what of this
he foreseen
what
the one
    foreseen
might possibly remember

this is a poem
about Parow

a God-forsaken place
jam-packed with churches

some of which, it must
be said, has
been said,

have needle sharp spires
pointing perpendicular
up at
the stars
       and the planets

Mars
    singled out high above
red
   as ever

something knowing
about that look
             if this
world of
dreams, and fears,
and desires
    and secrets

could ever look
         ever feel at all

OF FOREVER CHANGE

OF FOREVER CHANGE

O monstrous substance
truly

by
rule of thumb
you end in
  -um

are ever-expandimg
our poor periodic table

scare the life out of me
when you
get tetchy, too
much drawn
into yourself
         go fissile

can blow us to bits and
yet, and yet
where
   would we be
without you

clinging to ice and cold rock
nothing down at
deep mine depth
firing
   up the magma

giving us a landscape that’s
just too
        dynamic,
                         fire, earth,
air, water

stuff beyond the spectrum
so I
   can see right through you

see if
   the heart is right
the cells behaving

fusion separation what
was it
Heraclitus said

about these atoms
               agents of
forever
change

      architects of danger, sadness,
all the power in huge rejoicing

O monstrous substance
         so much to fear, such
a great
   debt we owe

might have to pay

JOB

JOB

God took Job
to the heart
of a star

thrust him deep
into that thermonuclear fire

explained the nature of
such mountainous energy
producing
   the rich elements
without which
no life

and Job lost
in awe
struck down
in wonder

though
this was far from  the point
so far
from
the point

to you or I
enmeshed in
the toul and hardship of
out working lives

and yet
    living, breathing
examples we
are here told
of all
that is wondrous
in divine création