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A Collection of Afrikaans poems with English translations

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Helize Van Vuuren

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 COMMUNION: AFRIKAANS POEMS WITH ENGLISH TRANSLATIONS - translated
by Helize van Vuuren (Final September 2019) - "The gates of grammar close behind him", Milosz
Section A:
1. Winter night - Eugène N. Marais - 2
2. Deep River - Eugène N. Marais - 2
3. The small song of longing - Eugène N. Marais/oral tradition - 2
4. The wind knows me by my name- Eugène N. Marais/oral tradition - 3
5. The desert pipit - Eugène N. Marais/oral tradition -3
6. A magic song to weaken the heart - Eugène N. Marais/oral tradition - 3
7. The song of the rain - Eugène N. Marais/oral tradition - 3
8. The Cape cobra - C. Louis Leipoldt - 4
9. The Purple Iris - A.G. Visser - 5.
10. Narrative - Elisabeth Eybers - 6
11. Pure mathematics - N.P. van Wyk Louw - 7
12. Kestrel - W.E.G. Louw - 7
13. The wildgoose dropped a feather - Boerneef - 7
14. XXXI. Her healthy, almost black eye - N.P. van Wyk Louw -7
15. XXXII. Frans suddenly... - N.P. van Wyk Louw - 7
16. Figure-head - Uys Krige - 8
17. Song of the orange - Uys Krige - 8
18. Fire beast - D.J. Opperman - 9
19. since 1963 the following prisoners - Breyten Breytenbach - 10
20. Becoming nude - N.P. van Wyk Louw - 11
21. Covered nude - Sheila Cussons - 11
22. A Paternoster for South Africa - Lina Spies - 11
23. The eland - Wilma Stockenström - 12
24. This life of mine - R.K. Belcher - 13
25. Talking of tools leads to embrace - D.J. Opperman -13
26. Bontekoe - D.J. Opperman - 14
28. Cape dockyard - D.J. Opperman - 15
29 Arrival at Cabo de Boa Esperança - D.J. Opperman - 15
30. Egyptian - D.J. Opperman - 15
31. Second marriage - D.J. Opperman - 16
32. robben island my cross my house - Frank Anthony - 16
33. The Lorelei - Barend J Toerien - 17
34. Riddle - P.J. Philander - 18
35. donum lacrimarum - Patrick Petersen - 18
36. 17 December 1988 - Breyten Breytenbach - 18
37. Wishing well - P.J. Philander - 19
38. Longing for home - P.J. Philander - 19
39. Small fire coal - P.J. Philander - 19
40. Now I pray - Matthews Phosa - 19
41. postcard for the sleepless - Breyten Breytenbach -20
42. Invitation - Wilma Stockenström - 20
43. Man in the tall grass - Wilma Stockenström - 21
44. This human - Wilma Stockenström - 21
45. Rock painting - Marlene van Niekerk - 21
46. Eyebright - Marlene van Niekerk - 22
47. Communion - Marlene van Niekerk - 23
48."Mehr licht! Mehr Licht!" - Breyten Breytenbach - 24
49. Ma, jus' imagine - Clinton V du Plessis - 24
50. the snow leopard - Jacobus Swart - 25
Section B:
From Tristia (1962) - N.P. van Wyk Louw (1906-1970) - 26-42

Section C:
From Five collections of prison poetry (1976-1983) - Breyten Breytenbach (1939- ) - 43-69
Winter night

Cold is the wind

and bleak.
And bright in the half-light
and bare,
as wide as God's grace,
lie the fields in starlight and shade.
And high on the hills,
spread in burnt hollows,
the seed-grass stir
like beckoning hands.

O woeful the tune

on the east wind's beat,
like the song of a girl
in her love's defeat.
In each grass blade’s fold
shines a drop of dew,
and presently fades
to frost in the cold!

- Eugène Marais - 1905

_____________________________________________________________________

Deep River
Translation of the song by Juanita Perreira

Oh, Deep River, Oh Dark Stream,

how long I waited, how long I dreamt,
the blade of love thrusting in my heart?
In your embrace ends all my sorrow;
Extinguish, O Deep River, the flame of hate, the
endless longing which never ceases.
I see from far the shine of steel and gold,
I hear the soft rush of waters deep and cold;
I hear your voice as whispering in a dream,
Come soon, Oh Deep River, Oh dark Stream.

- Eugène Marais - "Diep Rivier", Collected poems, 1933

__________________________________________________________

1. The small song of longing

What happens to the girl who stays always alone?

She waits no more for the hunters to come;
she lays no more the black thornwood fire.
The wind blows past her ears;
she hears no more the song of the dance;
the voice of the storyteller is dead.
No one calls her from afar
to speak words of beauty.
She hears just the voice of the wind alone,
and the wind always mourns
for he is alone.

2
2. The Wind knows me by my name

The spoor of the Heart-of-Dawn! -

For a long time, I saw them in the dew
before the sun erased them;
the small spoor of Nampti
make my heart sing.

3. The Desert Pipit

(Nampti sings to her mother:)

Gampta, my grey little sister!
All I have in the world
Except my old grandma.
When you sing high in the sky
You can see all the wonderful things below:
The young hare in its hollow
And where the small steenbok sleeps.
And the women can't touch you,
As you are stronger than everyone
Though you are weaker than me.
Even the mountain lion who frightens us
When he roars at night,
Cannot touch you.
I will guard you, my little sister,
Till all your children are grown.

(the Desert Pipit sings above her head:)

My grey little sister Nampti.
I see you.i
I will tell you a great thing:
Last night when the Ostrich-wifeii
With her small ones went down,
The mountain lion, who frightens you,
Trod on the poison-trap in the fountain kloof
And he lies dead in the great guarri bush.
The one who sticks his beard-hair under the skin,
Becomes a lion, as long as the Ostrich-wife
Feeds in the great field with her children.iii
___________________
i. Expression of gratitude
ii. The Pleiades
iii. Between the rising and descending of the Pleiades: at the start of winter.

4. A magic song to weaken the heart

The small grey kestrel nests in the krantz;

In vain werewolf and jackal come;
In vain meerkat peers.

A stone falls from the cliffs;

The blood spoor lead to the plains;
Her nest is safe.

5. The Song of the Rain

(Of Bent Joggom Konterdans)

First, from the mountain top, she peers furtively,

and her eyes are shy;
3
 and she laughs softly.
And from afar she beckons with one hand.

Her bracelets shine and her beads glitter;

softly she calls.
She tells the winds of the dance.

And she invites them, because the yard is wide and the wedding feast large.
The large game chase from the plains.
They dam up on the hilltop,
stretch wide their nostrils,
and swallow the wind;
and they bend, to her fine spoor on the sand.

Deep underground the small folk hear the drag of her feet,
and they crawl closer and sing softly:
"Our Big Sis! Our Big Sis! You came! You came!"

And her beads shake,

till the elders on their sleeping mats wake in the night
and talk in the dark;
and her copper ring shines in the fading sun.
On her forehead the fire-plume of the mountain-eagle;
she steps down from the height,
and spreads out the grey kaross with both arms;
the breath of the wind disappears.
Oh, the dance of our Big Sister!

- transposed by Eugène N. Marais from northern South African

Masele/Vaalpens oral tradition. In Dwaalstories [Nomadic
t Tales], 1921/1927
_____________________________________

The Cape cobra

The Cape cobra comes from his hole

and sneaks around the ridge:
"It's rained, the veld is wet,
and wet is the red-yellow earth."
The meerkat comes and his small eyes shine,
and he stands upright and waits.
And the stone-old porcupine says "I think
it'll rain again tonight."
But the gecko squeaks: "It's not rain at all!
It's sticky, black and red:
Where in your life do you find such rain -
so smooth, so stiff, so beautiful?"
And the wise old stone owl risks his word:
"It's blood, it's human blood!
It's lifeblood which this land's
shrub-roots feeds."

- C. Louis Leipoldt, from Dingaansdag [Dingaan's Day],1920

_________________________________________________________

4
The Purple Iris
To Marié.
Lente, lente currite noctis equi.

A prince I was in Easter-land,

Where ships with high masts go
From sun-gilded summer-strands
Over white-plumed watercourses
To wonderlands beyond the sea
with riches from Paradise
And seawards on the sea wind there
Did my desire ever strain
To search the equal of a Holy Grail
The age of a beauteous dream - my ideal.

What is a kingdom, and a throne

of jewels and of ivory?
A scepter and a golden crown
And heart's desire is yet lost?
Farewell, the feverish pleasure,
The hollow hearts of courts:
Welcome, my pilgrim's staff, my lyre!
Far richer stuff does my soul possess:
My song shall sound from land to land -
From Balsora to Samarkand!

Far did the wanderer rove around

To shepherds on Orontes’s flood
His fiery song repeated yet more fiery still
Spell-bound by their strange glow;
To virgins on the Shalimar
And nomads with the caravan,
Till each Eastern bazaar
The pilgrim knows, his song does comprehend -
His song which newly carries its content,
Old as the way to Jakarta!

"Only every thousand years

Bleeds purple in the lotus cup
of sacred Mana Sarovar
an Iris which does never wilt.
all purveying her mystic shine,
as it unfolds in Ariana's beams,
They shall perfect joy retain,
Nirvana for the soul attain."
So did Brahmin state himself -
And before me shines Mana Sarovar.

The lake reflects a green wood,

A waving water vision:
The sky ablaze with pure gold:
Tis love's high, golden noon.
White birds form a row of priests,
A shy buck comes and drinks,
And on the other side stands She
As if sunk deep in thought,
Where lotus flowers drift and dream,

5
Naiad of the water seam.

It was as if with wings upward I flew,

Raised far above the earthly dust,
And continued in her eyes to stare
Into love's inner court.
Nor time nor place existed there -
Bespoken thus by destiny;
In golden glory rose the moon -
Moon of joy so long expected,
And purple blooms there on the lake
After a thousand years, once more the Iris!

Walk slowly, horses of the night;

Slow down, oh hours, your pace;
Stand, stars, stand as guard of honour;
An eternity is not too long
- "Till day breaks and the shadows flee" -
when intense love feasts supreme.
Low hangs the red moon in the sky,
And I awake and find you here
And look once more into the loyal eyes
Of my adoration...then and now!

- A.G.Visser, 1878-1929 - "Die Purper Iris", in Die purper iris en ander nagelate gedigte [The Purple
Iris and other posthumous poems], 1930.

_____________________________________________________________

Narrative

A woman fell silent from endless waiting:

earth slid through the spiral
of day and night, now green then gray,
she sometimes cried and sometimes laughed.

Often awake during the night,

yet in her home and along the street
she spoke and acted as before
so no-one saw her waiting.

Desire becomes acceptance, step by step,

as waiting alternates with hope and despair, till the
two become one and silence reigns alone.

And through the years she grew into the end of

the story: more beauty
has the power of her silence than the long-awaited.

Elisabeth Eybers, “Verhaal”, from Die ander dors, 1946

6
Pure mathematics

The clockwork topples. And the light-brown bee

hangs motionless before the flower never to be fertilized
never to seed, wilt, and never to grow
past this petrified hour. The air

has frozen like ice, so white and blue.

The wave that would bend over, fall, and foam,
stays in his light circles held
and must forsake his sea for an eternity.

- NP van Wyk Louw Nuwe verse [New Verse], 1954

___________________________________________________________________

Kestrel

White is the world

with old-fashioned woe
and a sad waltz
the sea at dawn;
dew on the dune no wind that stirs,
just a kestrel that sings as he turns, as he turns...

- W.E.G. Louw, Die ryke dwaas [The rich fool], 1954

_____________________________________________________________________

The wildgoose dropped a feather

from the highest cliff at Wooperthal
more and more my heart swells up
I send to you this feather-from-the-mount
herewith to say with the feather that flies
how deep my love for you does lie

- Boerneef (pseud. IW van der Merwe), Ghaap en

kambro, 1959

XXXI*
Her healthy, almost black eye
for one second his eye met
and then petrified again: lye
on fat; blood on red plastic; shut, then.

And the cry of the fire brigade's siren

from the side of the Waterkant
did again, cause something like carbide light to burn
in his word-thinking's churn.

He was forced from his bicycle; had to walk,

and pushed the cycle through the large crowd,
and a tic, aimed at the shrill light,
flapped out somewhere from his cheek.

XXXII
Frans suddenly: "Ella Meissenheimer
she was nineteen eight and 7
twenty March about half-eight and
in front of the post office with spring before
us, then in the one cubicle
in the one office we'd..." Oh, Frans thought:
"She has blood coral in her ear
she had those the day in nineteen
eight, the one cubicle in the office
blood coral earrings in her ear
those she stowed away in her handkerchief
after the park, and in..."
"pig's teeth and coral," Frans said,
"those are only worn by niggers in the kraal."
She laughed. And yet it was a pity,
because the lammergeyer feasts so above the kraal,
and the blood coral did laugh out kraal and blood
so splendidly from underneath the brown hair.

- NP van Wyk Louw - Tristia, 1962

(* intertext of these two verses from Anna Seghers's anti-fascist novel, Das siebte Kreuz)
___________________________________________________________________________

Figurehead

Between these cold grey walls here

do I smell, suddenly, perhaps the sea?
What gives this headless girl
this proud, strong mien?
She strives into the wind, his foam, his power
and along with her a whole ship windwards lean!
_______

Song of the orange

"What did the sun do to you,

orange?"
"He stroked me, kissed me.
Now I'm red and ripe and round,
a joy for eye and mouth!"

"The sun touched you with his light,

orange?"
"He scorched me, burnt and bleached me.
Now I am fire from that source,
pure flame, pure sun!"

"And at night the moon...what of the moon,

orange?"
"Her silver arms around me folded,
softly seeped into my juice, slowly."

"The earth gave you nothing,

orange?"
"His clay drenched by dew or rain.
Now I am sun and moon and day and night,
possess of earth and air their moisture, and their might."

"What did man do to you,

orange?"
8
"He did protect me, guard me.
Now I'm this blessing on his striving,
symbol of fertility and life!"

"What must we do with you,

orange?"
"I want to be a golden glow between the green,
plucked then, thus with my fate reconciled,
orange only be, orange, orange, orange!"

- Uys Krige Vooraand [Early evening], 1964

Fire beast

The buffalo knows no metaphysics:

he seeks the sweet grass
and the waterhole, will
rough-up calves,
maul an enemy with his horns,
sniff the cow,
hide from hail,
but asks no questions about tomorrow –
the buffalo knows no metaphysics.

Only man
finds in his wandering
between today, the future and the past
the narrow crack to caves
of reason
makes a knife,
a fire,
creates gods,
thinks of dying,
mumbles prayers
and driven by exorcism paints
upon a wall of his cave the buffalo;

the buffalo of the metaphysics:

the fire beast in himself
follows by force
his drives and dreams to the very end,
and stimulus to the brain
becomes pyramids, the Last Communion,
wheel, chrome,
projectiles, products of the atom,
et cetera.

And before his insane stare,

shaken,
man realises
he will not retreat
from the all-annihilating battlefield -
broken already lies
the Parthenon and Hiroshima
in violence’s evil beauty.
The buffalo knows no metaphysics.
- DJ Opperman “Vuurbees”, from Dolosse, 1963
_________________________________________________________________
9
 since 1963 the following prisoners,
under treatment of the security police,
gave birth to their death:

BELLINGTON MAMPE

LOOKSMART SOLWANDLE NGUDLE

SIPHO JAMES TYITA

SULIMAN SALOJEE

JAMES HAMAKWAYO

HANGULA SHONYEKA

LEONG YUM PIN

AH YAN

ALPEUS MALIBA

J.B. TUBAKWE

NICODIMUS KGOATHE

SOLOMON MODIPANE

JAMES LENKOE

CALEB MAYEKISO

MICHAEL SHIVUTE

JACOB MONAKGOTLA

IMAM ABDULLAH HARON

MTAYENI CUSHELA...

we shall remember

- Breyten Breytenbach, SKRYT Om 'n sinkende skip blou te verf Verse en tekeninge
[SCRACHE To paint a sinking ship blue Verse and drawings], 1972

________________________________________________________________________________

10
 Becoming nude

Down now the dark-red jacket glides,

first from the left and then the right shoulder,
then over the dark head the grey jersey slides
and in their bra the small breasts come alive

then her crossed hands shoot up past armpit bushes

quickly crossed, and in an instant drop
the ribbons and the two white nests
while over their dale the tiny twin peaks quiver

as she crosses again the arms a-shiver

takes the shoulder knobs, and above the rose-red
nipples and six white bridges of the ribs
the sun-brown of her elbows tremble

on a chair linen-shreds hang empty

and barely sway; shoes fall apart,
with many stirrups the stockings come away
and before me in the light brief you stand

then the whole of you emerge, brown with white, from there
the rounded muscles of the thighs around the shining black.

- NP van Wyk Louw (1906-1970) - posthumous verse

________________________

Covered nude

A blaze I bear
between my blood and the world
more mine, more uniquely me than anything
a sans-name
of which to shear
would be my slaughter:
oh unbearable, tender, defenceless shirt of flame.

– Sheila Cussons Die swart kombuis [The black kitchen], 1978

_______________________________
A Paternoster for South Africa

Lord, hallowed be the names

of all the children of this land
of them
who swam in streams, chased
rock rabbits in her kloofs, trod
wool there in the kraal.

I watched with bated breath

dark torsos shearing sheep,
sharp scissors halting every step
fearing slippage, blood and pain.
Careful were the darker hands
seldom cutting deep
the tokens I’d give out to workers
11
 for their keep
a token for each sheep they freed to
wander on the hills.

The bales sewn-up and wheeled away

my feet washed clean of oil
from treading there

Forgive us now, the rested ones with little memory

as we forgive the angry ones
who never knew a kraal,
rode a horse of reeds
or went barefoot onto the land

and Lord, see our hands:

my white pulse with a band
a darker playmate twined from grass
as I could never do…

To You belong the

land the sun
the pastured sheep

Give us loving hands, oh Lord,

and will You cut with care the inhibiting cloak
so that no unnecessary blood is spilled

and hand out Yourself the tokens

- Lina Spies from Digby Vergenoeg, 1971

________________

The Eland

12
 that gives life to the stone

hand that gives life living hand

dips arrow into poison of snake and poison bush and
sets the bow broad as the horizon

– Wilma
aimed at the sign drawn against
Stockenström, the vergetelheid
from Van large largeensky
van glans
[Of forgetfulness and of shimmer],1976
_________________________

This life of mine

for one pound nine
today it's quiver
tomorrow it's shiver
*
A house in which to stay
at Idas Vlei
but I still dream my dream
of twig-and-clay
*
Cape Town's moffies
eat chocolates and toffees
Woodstock heavies-in-leather
drink tankards of stormy weather
*
The willow a-weep
yes, the willow a-weep
but tomorrow at dawn
I'll cry before your door
*
A white cloud like a hand
yes, a white cloud like a hand
then I knew there will be water
on the dry land
*
Salt snoek and sweet potato
salt snoek and sweet potato
Cape Town's tastiest little fish
another man took her as dish
- R.K. Belcher So is die lewe vir een pond sewe
[This life of mine for one pound nine], 1978
_______________________________

Talking of tools leads to embrace

There is a quiet talking

which writing brings
when, as by itself,
the key
gets the context
and for the hand
in the pinch
awaits the foreseen grasp

when the rusted nut

refuses and resists
to give, but under

13
double force
and with the help
of oil, three-in-one,
begins to move,

so that Tools
Bolt and Nut
while talking
bring the thread
to the groove
and the spiral
dance fulfilled.

- DJ Opperman Komas uit 'n bamboesstok

[Comas from a bamboo stick], 1979
___________________________________

Bontekoe

It started at candlelight with the tot

when vats enflamed and the ship
full of burning brandy leapt up
and shot me, Bontekoe, nearer to God.
I fell back...had to climb into a smaller boat.

A while, in the ship's flames,

we see cheeses, human heads, watermelons,
cantaloupe, pickled pigs, and shoulder-blades adrift
in boiling water whipped
by swordfish and bluefin sharks.

I ration the bread and water.

The bread is done. From our last vat
Each morning I spoon into the nose of a shoe
a swallow. Each drinks his own urine,
bellies and legs swell - some burst green.

The sailors whisper and murmur at night.

See, see how at the young boy they stare.
I talk and implore, our Dear Lord beseech,
when all at once out of the mist and tropical rain
around us a thousand gulls screech.

Later the sailors again: the boy! I pledge

if no outcome, my body, my own.
But suddenly from the water breaks a bow
of flying fish. And bobbing nearer -
oh God, thrice praised! - a hairy coconut.
_____

Cape dockyard

The large old giant lies on his bed:

cables and pipes run from his innards,
ropes on deck; at the edge
of the enormous hole blaze blue-flame
apparatus. The portholes are open,

14
corpses of passengers removed,
sailors who believe in mirages
of women, icebergs and green serpentines.
The orchestra is silent. A seagull sits.

Before us, in the white silence, stands magnificent,

this morning returned: the Titanic.
____________

Arrival at Cabo de Boa Esperança

After seven long months over saltwater

and chimeras of come and go, come and go,
the drifting human heads, cheeses, watermelons,
the leaking old body, the pipes dripping
with rust-water, the sluicing of vomit-clots,
living between rat excreta and curry cockroaches,
nibbling on the last pickled pigs' rind,
an oozing of maggot-waters from the vats,
gums which rot off, green shit heaps,
the crackling of the skin and feverish faces
of mediaeval liver recipes:
endive,
a soupçon of marigold, juice of nightshade,
fumitory...
after the battle with the elements
at last the syrup of calamint
Den Lusthof der Maatschappij*.
__
* The Paradise of the Company (V.O.C.: Verenigd Oost-Indische Compagnie/United East-Indian Company)
_______________________________________

Egyptian

Isolated
far in the hinterland
cousins
breed
with one another.

And from the boughs

of trees
bird people
and liver snails droop.

Amongst the rich

the flies sit
on the eyes
of the dumb
half genii.

The throats
cut
of calves born
two-in-one.

And you and I

15
shy
of the world outside
what become of us,
my beloved sister?
______

Second Marriage

To you who never did forget

come I, who had left
you, return after all these years,
exhausted with the bamboo cane
from stupors,
from cocoons of my long journeys,
from comas with the glow of ochre,
from the hither-and-thither weaving of the yellow thread,
of grey caterpillars that devoured
all, of various mulberry leaves,
come to you, Beloved, with this quiver.

- DJ Opperman Komas uit 'n bamboesstok

[Comas from a bamboo cane], 1979

robbeneiland my cross my home

morning
cape town
harbour
picture
handcuff
chains*

between chain
and chain
our hedge props
the iron
of imprisonment
jingle
on the ring-leader goats

dumb sea
shiver
with shine

a ferry waits
nodding
towards his ten terrorists

we laugh
at iron pretension
the death-sweat fear
of their heart

on the quay
the black workers
16
 laugh
with us

fore
aft
watershed
between hell
bigger hell
what does it matter
because who
doesn’t know
robben island
and his eager
masters
the fearful
green helicopters
over head

then we descend
bait
on clanging chains
into the boat's
under-deck*
and the workers
do not greet us

porthole
oh porthole
tell table mountain
we say hello and goo'bye

*political prisoners (the south african government still refuses to acknowledge that south africa has political prisoners - much like the
portuguese authorities refused to acknowledge a colonial empire) was (is?) draped with much melodrama in heavy chains en route to
the island jail. the harbour workers found it endlessly amusing. the source of great psychological propulsion for out faring prisoners.
*the ferries used for this ritual-symbolic out faring are embedded like personalities (even acquaintances) in the memory of everyone
involved with the island, prisoner and warder equally - the issie, the diaz, the blouberg, and after the soweto unrest the susan kruger,
named after the spouse of the minister of justice at that time, jimmy kruger.
*the under-deck of the ferries form (formed?) once more part of the symbolical-ritual structure of the ejection game which shape the
basis of the island prison concept. it is the stowing place (stuffy and profane) for hither- and thither-faring prisoners and all visitors
(black) with very few exceptions who associate with them on any level.

- Frank Anthony - robbeneiland my kruis my huis [robben island my cross my home], 1983
[Footnotes an integral part of the poems. Supplied by author. NB: This poem comprises 66 pages, of which only a translation
of the first four pages printed here.]

______________________________________________________________________________

The Lorelei

Nothing tastes sweeter on my tongue

- I need to eat and drink and fondle it –
than my language my cunnilingua
which alone will still the quiver of my hungry tongue;
can’t live without it.

- Barend J. Toerien, 1982, from Parte speel, 1991

17
Riddle

Small half-jack two kinds of wine,

it's the ancient source of pain.

- P. J. Philander Vuurklip [Firestone], 1960

__________________________

donum lacrimarum

in forgotten caves
of my psyche stares
this word at me:
tears are a gift
for our south african being.

oh Lord keep butterfly and my

tears in our jar,
a gift from Your hand
one which runs over our cheek
one which goes through the heart.

- Patrick Petersen amandla ngawethu [Power to the people], 1985

____________________________________________

17 December 1988

this thing (fancy interpreters call exile)

clings to you always in waiting-room and on stoop
never leaves you, carts you along to strange places
night after night in another flecked bed
you are the eggless nest of the thieving bird

in the small heart of darkness rattles and quivers

oh geez dear Lord never sufficiently praised
a train through the meadow of your temples

is it water's inexplicable cuckoo-speak

spitting into sluice pipe and chute?
gypsies tell jokes and dreams in a theatre

chased from your tree you mumble of goose and of spout

in the mirror you own the blue face
turned fool

between sod-cold sheets this thing

will embrace you again on your travels
while the old monkey-breath adjusts to rhythm and rime

sing, sing, mate, sing!

- Breyten Breytenbach Soos die so

[Things as they are/Tathatã],1990
____________________________________________

18
Wishing well

The bottom of my wishing well

I paved with small bright stones
in memory of her
one last image
of a Milky Way put there
adjacent to my heaven with its Southern Cross.

Longing for home

The winds cry around my house,

all that's missing is the Southern Cross
above Swartberg, Grootkop, the Outeniquas
with its firewood aplenty for my hearth.

Small fire coal

Small coal, bloodred little coal,

far too soon
you're blanketed in ash.

With each wind-swirl

your new fire
flamed in brilliance above the ash;

a new flame shoots

in the dark chimney
of my sorrow,

but now you're only ash

no more the wealth of warmth
in this dark grave of a house.

- PJ Philander, late poems, 'n Keur uit sy gedigte [Selected poems], 1996
________

Now I pray

God, help me, I swim in unrighteousness,

I was born in sin.
My faith deserts me every day:
I want to, but I cannot always.

Haughty I am towards my fellowman.

You know how I discriminate against them
because they are too white.
God, help me I am a sinner.

The grace which I ask from you daily, I do not have,

because I grab, kick and spit in their faces.
All that I relinquish, are crumbs
which they must scrape up to survive.

My heart turned to stone long ago,

19
I no longer lie awake about my sins.
I therefore ask for a soft and wise heart
to be humane in my attitude towards my people.

- Matthews Phosa, Through the eye of a needle, 1996

_____________

postcard for the sleepless

like a shell from the deep

which opens to show its colours -
slowly the day turns light -
the early chaloupe waddles and waits for passengers
to transport over
to Africa -
kites cut up the sky
in small slices screech-noise
as lament for the fading of stars -
the first madman has loudly begun to protest
against the illusion
of stars' disappearance as rescue -
the baker with floury hands
loads his paper-bags filled with bread
on a trolley -
the lines of anglers on the stones
run down into the deep
lisping darkness
in search of fish -
like an opening shell
display the colours
of a hand trying to swallow words -
pirogues trip a dance across the swell's
slight revolt and shift
and the men stand upright
to greet the light
and pull up
the baskets off-loaded at night -
but it's already too late for secrets -
but already the sun
has risen above the opening infinity:

this greeting of mine

has no closing line

- Breyten Breytenbach katalekte (artefakte vir die stadige gebruike van doodgaan)
[catalects (artefacts for the slow uses of dying], 2012
_______________

Invitation

There's a smile in his voice.

He says: come in, come in,
we work no more with linen,
now its ash and bones and smoke
from a fire professionally stoked
but still meant for that final destiny of no choice.
______
20
Man in the tall grass

I see a black man coming through the tall grass:

long pants, naked chest, jacket,
knapsack over the shoulder. I see him come,

go, do not know where to or from where,

but my imagination lets him walk
from north to south and from west to east.

Wherever I travel or live or visit,

the black man walks through grass, bush,
thorns that hook and healing herbs,

always searching for a footpath through landscape

after landscape after landscape and certain it is he
breathes in the future and exhales the past.
________________

This human

This person's face falls apart.

The hand loses fruit and meat and pen.
The foot stumbles even on level ground.

This person calls himself obligingly human,

laughs a sound-track to that which turns,
splits and fissions, speckles that speckle,

deepdark disa-red, blousporrie-blue's blue.

Of this human only the sound remains
which looks for a form which to inhabit.

- Wilma Stockenström (1933- ), Hierdie mens [This human], 2013

__________________________________

Rock painting
(From the Cederberg suite)

Who made you, small quagga filly, stand upright,

alone here on your first legs,
a birth moment the size of a hand,
shaky and with lips asunder
in fresh bleating, eyeless in the first light, a
mouth blindly searching for the udder,
who coloured you in here, Equuleus of the Cederberg, in the
first dressing of the back quarters,
in the precarious tightening up of the frontal part,

threw a red balance in the gray

oneway grain of stone,
brought a gravity of defencelessness
which binds us in, tourists of oblivion
strung together by emotion,
binds us to your first painter
in the unspectacular patriotism of tenderness.
21
 In our navel stirs the same brush,
red ochre, eland fat,
in our face the same dead stars,
we who come up through the centuries from
the brown river, spotted you, renamed you,
protect you always, Celeris, fast vibrating
shadow
on this threshold rock - whether
you die, nose flat
against the gray law of the stronger ones -
or dance away playfully on your thin legs, beautiful, prancing in
the wine-brown water of time.
____________________

Eyebright

All flesh is grass,

and all the goodliness
thereof is as the flower of the field...
The grass withereth, the flower fadeth:
but the word of our God
shall stand for ever.
Isaiah 40:6-8

Although lament
and solace of the prophet
is not undone thereby (the breath of god
and genocide apart), the biotope
of man and word
may for the poet's sake
find closer nuance:
keep in mind that eyebright,
helmet-shaped,
from grass her salt
and water sucks.
Where wild barley
sways therefore with sparks
and the singer with his pearl-blue
view, his insight stained with gold,
forces himself hip-deep in
between the stems
to note the longed-for source
and mechanics of the teeming,
he finds
origin and jointedness
of lyric: an airy
measured
coffin for loss.
In haulms on paper,
their silver loads
a dynamite he
hammers and hinges
joint by joint in grey graphite
in front to fall tight
and backwards,
by wind affected,

22
shoot open, he suspects
the withering. Shining he stands
in their midst, eye
in eye with the still unwilted
flower, Euphrasia stricta,
humble content,
harmless parasite.
_________

Communion

Cloud heads bulbous white and green early summer reed

and grass frame high and underneath the stone-blue dam.
At the waterside I see a man, his hair white and full,
his shoulders thin in denim blue. He sits reflecting, still and silent,
the incline of his neck suggests unutterabilities.
I stand and watch him in his back, the water and the cloud-filled sky
my face does rearrange, my pupils guide the floating seed
of thistle-flower inwards, from my hips in the ranking weed
my language grows into the universe searching for a parable,
but all I see is that which is in front of me, it is just as it is -
the whirling of the thunderhead repeats the hair crowns on his head
a rippling reflects man and cloud in myriads of small dams around
where a thousand times a man hulks, a thousand times a woman
holds back in order to release that which by two are thought.

- Marlene van Niekerk Kaar [untranslatable - possible wordplay on scar, care, kaput, klaar - half of
common multilingually-applied South African expression: "It is/I am finish en klaar"(completed; over,
extinguished); also basket, funeral casket, krater, crater, chora], 2013
_______________________________

“Mehr Licht! Mehr Licht!”

and if I should fall asleep

in this large light space
on the sheet-covered sofa facing the big
windows
offering a view of the wide beach wiped
word-white
by the wind from the mountains above
and the seam of breakers
and their inaudible telling of a
bright burning-glass sea
with the sun drifting above like a glistening to
the horizon
to the horizon

will you when the room darkens

come to switch on the lights
so that the shell of clarity

may stay transparent and yet

aid the journey of nomadic stars overhead on
their way to vanish into the dark
may aim inwards
and all the endlessness of
a reflected day’s glow
23
 continue outside the panes like shining skin?

and later during the night when I

finally fall asleep
am still sleeping open-eyed to oversleep in
the shelled light’s spiral of depth when the
sky once more whitens to ash but skewly
still dawns
of that hour where borders are timeless
and the dream
a cream-white skin full of unwritten words lies
down on the sand for fulfillment
in spoors born from movement
that astounds
and measures the tides
all forgetting to fill
and grinds the sailor-bones to sound

will you then douse the lights

and keep the final departure
from ridicule by the outside’s concern
with the shiver of shudders inside?

so that
the crossing

may be seamless and

unfold and stream
towards the
horizon? horizon?
- Breyten Breytenbach – from Op weg na kû, 2019
_________

Ma, jus' imagine

Jus' imagine you could read, ma

jus' think,
then you could sit in the sun
with my books and brag
"these the laaitie wrote himself,
I wonder where the talent's from,
thought a lot - suppose he got it from his dad."

Jus' imagine you could write, ma

jus' think,
then you could make notes about your own life:
hard labour in fruit-canning factories
journals of scrubbing floors
and shut-up and keep going and hold on
an existence with bitterly few choices:
in order to survive
in order to keep us going.

Ma, jus' imagine, how wide and open your world might have been
but, this coin's also got a flipside
now you remember dishes without a recipe book,
24
survive without a manual for the guidance of the elderly.

Here, close to 93
each day you tackle life and death
so without pretension,
without pen,
without paper.

- Clinton V du Plessis, "Ma, imagine net", Litnet 2019

the snow leopard

for Heleen Louw

ears pulled flat

squatting against thin-peeled light rolled down into
the baptism basin
the encloistered foot-cushion on the rock

a mountain goat
the jell point
in the pale green lava glass of your eye

along the perpendicular krantz

a falling gnomon
mountain-slope and goat
a crumbling grid location

after the precipice

the golden ratio of your leopard torso
a stretched bow
brush-conceived by your intrepid tail half a
Rorschach
behind his stretched front claw

upper and lower jaw reconcile

in the young ewe's exposed neck
the severing of the fangs

guttural
in virginal silence
under the touch of a finger
with breath and blood
the cave wall disturbed to life

- Jacobus Swart, Litnet, 11/9/2019

_______________________________________________________________________________________________

25
 FROM TRISTIA (1962) - N.P. VAN WYK LOUW (1906-1970)
(Tristia en ander verse voorspele en vlugte 1950-1957/Tristia and other verses, preludes and flights 1950-
1957, was the poet's final, and sixth volume of poetry)

Prélude 1950
Perhaps I’ll praise the vineyard
and never drink thereof again
but only in imagined glass
decant the well-chilled thought:

which darkness of the years

have been allowed to clear
and shows no residue of summer
no pith nor skin nor stalk:

perhaps still know of God’s ways:

- His pathways and His pain:
but involuted know it all
and shall be man and pure.

Rain forest

The tropical rain forest is

also growing cold
nothing in this country
can hold.
*
You have left and now you live
in a silver pension in the snow
your windows still look every night
with three bright eyes onto the square
the square is tree and wind and tree
and wind and wind
and winter’s dusk someone there
feeds crumbs to gulls against the wind
*

A jackal digs into the snow

he speckles red against the white
and starts and listens with ears upright
to digging somewhere in the yard.

My fatherland, my dry, bleak fatherland:

something longs that olives in you grow:
that all turn Latinised, small
and tiny chalk-white churches there may stand.

The jackal digs into the snow,

some sober white he kicks
from behind his buttocks out,
and Deaf-Pete keeps on digging.

26
Epitaphe pour lui-même

He never did get much love,

did he?
but what kind of loveliness was he?
*

I believe I was as much poison to you

As you were poison to me.
Come, let us decide: we will not fight:
*

Small variation on the word “go”

Being so used to going,

we got to thinking: the going is good. But
each going becomes: dying on foot. The
end is bitter. And this is the end.
*

Northerly June

I thought I had for one whole day

not remembered you:
the day’s float would not,
could not, would not sink:

now sings the blackbird four of the morning

where I wait above the town
just now the crow will come
and tell of dawn.

At dawn the light will come

and be quiet, and wait,
and not to wake her, he will know; and
then the day –

he who mercilessly out of sleep

rises over good and evil
will only round her insecurity
fall silent for a while
(oh! the bed of sorrow
wherein we wake
and try to row with a small fin
against watery things showering down; and

row backwards where it still is stream

and ray and dream,
in against the breaking-of-dams:
a golden little goldfish)

but: then noon will stand

and be scorching over her too
and be loud with talk and the world become bland action and
each word gathered in

27
 which she in lightest impulse
and ambiguity did say;
and have her little systems in his hand
and gathered in his smile;

and then, he will himself, and quietly, wait,

until evening comes:
and he will cry over her wish
and fall quiet over the child.
*

Did the day turn to nil because

she does not fret because she –
caught in God – doesn’t need to
forget.

On a dusty street, somewhere far, she’s

walking in a pair of jeans, pondering
wild draughts and drinking coco-cola in
a bar.
*

Greeting in brown

Now I want to see you in a kind of mediterranean

clarity, one last time: walking in sneakers or string sandals over
a sun-sealed beach;
or upwards in a simmering street where buses struggle up,
stop at hotels, wait for lights.

Come, I will offer you the last, the

out-shining respect, that
which shines from inns where there is birthing,
up-shine also from lonely tasks
which in the shrine (help me St. Joseph!) of
work is being completed.

- Allow me the word! Oh, bless You the word:

You, before which as Path-grader
Gabriel with tiny rainbow-feathers
came to lay in your ear the Other Word
for later contemplation. Allow me the word:

earthy words (oh Beloved as earth):

allow her, she who never had rest, to have rest:
(brown as brown people, brown as umbrian pain-
inducing terra-cotta, brown, yes,
as the baked earth from near Siena - )

brown skin from a cheap alley - this too may - of

Amsterdam, and the brownness of the world near
the market of this Old Barcelona
where cantaloupes and watermelons and
young constables watch each other.

(Oh "brown", which You: Lord and God, blessed

in your brown jewish son who in Galilee
28
had to walk a footpath, and against the mountain sat and
talked, and in the ship
from afar could make a great noise heard.)

Lovely, small, woman: in the shining respect which I,

walking, attentively, offer you: take:
the white water of Tarragona, the naked and
the white of the mediterranean
almost-not-knowing, skewly-knowing full-well.

*
Come, evening. Come, night. Then I am alone again. at
first I am in you, my half silver evening:
half of the world, me, and half of you;
something like April: spring and hungrily, because

experience of opening up, of the swelling

and growing shinier in the chestnut tree, and
still: back from yearning
in December and the dark and the snow.

29
And then: my night, my night: fulfilment
more perfect than the world I know of:
childless, joyless and unsad tideless
friend of mine, my night.
*

Glorious it is: water with the wine. only

the gluttons drink pure wine, gorge and
enjoy from what is naked. But the
Veiléd is glorious;
we suffer so heavily from the abyss:
abysses have become prevalent
Blacker black within the black:
there we have become attentive viewers and
connoisseurs of yellow inside yellow;
because the Abyss splits himself open and
presents himself, announces himself, lies,
even lies tranquilly around us; known from
infancy, never to be denied.
And everyone prays to his depths
simply out of habit or because of superstition:

because his name is Abyss.

But we, we will name the Veiléd.
We name him, he is here!
He who comes in to our somber feast,
masked. I now announce the Wine-Man:
even if the brown leaves hang askew on his forehead, he
starts mentioning the words, words never
to be understood by the abysmal:
I hear him sing and sing of the visible.

The organ for the abyss: to feel with a tentacle:

precisely how he takes my skin –
there we fall short; while others hear the abyss
roar on both sides, as daily burden,
have learnt to accept it as traffic noise.
A woman who was becoming holy with difficulty, was
tasting the breadth, and fear for the newness and new
community; she searches for silence; refuses the
loudness. But still it stays loud:
(she is one who in the tilted mirror
puts a touch more red on the lips
while on Vishnu or Aquinas
she ponders considerably, and considers a small eye-movement for
tomorrow – or has already decided):
loud is his nature; our nature is mixed.
And she longs back to her nature of silence. But
holiness does not identify either of the two:
loudness or silence; is equally familiar

30
with each one’s claim.
Our steel conception which is too sharply honed, so
that what had to be blade, surrenders
and becomes notched, where it simply had to be
ploughshare to break soil –
it still wants to plough fallow land!
Perhaps it will plough open fallow land here. But
we know for the moment: nothing is said. Let the
known, familiar, rather die:
the word can be said – not the meaning:
- luckily: man keeps loving the Veiléd.

He looks for the ideal woman: the “eternal mistress”, she

“who does not want to marry” and become a “dairy” she who
“will not see the man as a breakfast-ticket”
or “insurance policy”:
the boy-girl, the girl-boy, loose
of the biological
with the more-or-less little breasts according
to what needs to be accentuated
jock-strap or bra.
He sits and sniffs, now,
mostly, and writes, and rubs sweat across his pate; and his
club fills up at twelve o’clock
with old men coming to ask
- with indirect remarks (never questions!) -
whether one of the members had never caught
out the indirect mistress upon the truth.

*
What an image of God: those who have not, desire;
those who have, throw away. He, God, was alone, and
then he yearned, and for his cold loneliness
he created what He loved till it became flesh
-till the tarnishment – and till the dying thereof;
and between the blind stages those of desire and repugnance, He
allowed sin and degeneration; at least: that is alleged.
Perhaps nothing else remain but the eyes:
to see the carpenter carpent, the joiner joining the
plougher plough – if he can plough;
to see the little clerk clerking in his collar; the quaker quaking: and
to see the preachers avenging the wrath:
the little widower preacher
now Boanerges against sin;-
and: to see the tobacconist happily selling tobacco.
The highly reputed love will also find its way. At
least we have considerable ironic space.

31
The visible and the moment
is ploughed open, open, at last – is
never again unworthy or sham; they
reign in us Once:
stand on the edge of the wave (stand,
stand: can never fall!) between what
was and what will be,
- dune street lies both sides of the dune, naturally
does not get lost in being thought;
fear not, is not even embarrassed
over their (this!) transcience because
each of them know: I am; and the
eternal, it is premeditated.
The deed dies: of devouring the minutes.
The moment and the visual is.
From now on there will be said.
*

We cannot talk: not you with me:

because in my sour love
your words struggle like drowning flies;
I not with you: where I talk
I know that each word of mine
is awaited behind the doors of your ear and
throttled by your quiet hatred. Not us, not
psychologists, nor psychiatrists can break
the salt crust of the desert.
Only a godhead could succour:
make the desert green again which
put down his arid, parched
verneukpan mud in us;
cause water to break out in the dry pan
and drive crowbars in under
my logical intellectuality.
*

Ring walls white around vineyards

the heart stays closed like a ring
but open and outside borders hulks the pain
*

32
 summer is a day old and I turn gray
of hue
*
You must allow me, Lord, to lightly indicate pre-signs
(signs have their own sign-ness)
and do not yell loudly like symbols
with advertisement; and yet remain signs.

*
Now I see clearly: the earth is withered;
and the Universe shows his molar to the land.
Libra-in-the-stars weighs sand
and even the wilted vineyard shows signs of mirth!

Our talking singly of abstractions peal but

my words feed the earth sod after sod and
round the fire, the hearth and the pot I bind, I
bind, in hatred organize and deal.

*
Perhaps you should rather prepare for death
than to fetch another bottle of beer - put cigarettes at
hand. It is not only a case of metra
or rather: you are being measured; your stresses and
falls are noted and the flow of the phrases, the transparent period
which gets a fullstop, of your life: it is being weighed while you are weighing.
You hope, and you hope that the last, the final notion will
throw a noose around a part of the world
at least that, this, together with the other
will be forced to lie down as one piece of beastliness,
throttled to exhaustion. But around you there are smiles.
Work is being done on you here where you are sitting working. The
deathly Sisters are already thinking of a final line.
and you know: the lines of theirs and of yours, don’t rhyme
- was incompatible long long before the x's
smiled over the simple idea of an earth.

*
And furthermore you’re warthog in the sun and rub
your warts and tusk against a log and sneeze from the
dust and live in the dust
and burrow yourself deeper into the earth
and lunge lazily at the rock.

Do not lie down in the white dung the frost

covers the dungheap in August dung there is
and of dung there is enough we do not have
to add or to deal in it

33
exaggerations there will be and added on
and dung will be flung till the end;
even without us. We do not have to add.
We do not have to add or to detract.

*
The wind in the bay died down; and around
over Hout Bay, over Camps Bay
and at Seapoint it kept blowing white heads. But
in the bay the wind died down:
everything wants to look locked-up – almost safe -; and
a boy in a tin boat did,
handkerchief for sail
- without boom -, planks for oars,
dare it out
- because the wind over the bay died down. And we
pray to the mountain the wind the planet to give up
everything which is in the nature of wind mountain
and planet
and for a moment (a moment!)
only to smolder, smolder over the fear for the fear and
the unselfconscious rowing of the boy
in this short silence inside the bay.

*
I hate and I love: I do not know how.
Oh my country, oh my country: you am I. I
know you and I hate you as I hate myself.
I love you as I sometimes dare to love myself.

*
It could well be a thousand years before sharp thinking will
be known again, will be said again. Language itself will
become machinery to grind flour,
and linen and steelnuts; and man
will become a thick malt
heaped up and turned in on himself and without vision.
But during this time he will become free of looking for an outcome, will
learn to look into his glass sternum
without minding who else peers in there;
because in a thousand years so much peering would have been done that
even an Eye itself will never be free again;
a pulsating artery will throb like a little lizard-belly
and never and never will become shocked out of rhythm.
Everything will be kneaded into a dough and
the nausea will wallow around the earth
perhaps for a thousand years, a thousand years.
Then something will awake again, here, there:

34
 and a brain will have learnt to think Three Things interlinked where
before there was gnawing only at one.

*
I will not say a thing.
Every spoken thing was said before
something took our purity.

We are the repetition

endless decimal
multiplication and decimalisation

I of the decimal
I want to reach the end.

*
Evil chamber

At last we come clear again

untie the last knot
put light on in the brown cellar a
golden brown hue washes all

blondes and blondettes

gather form, become human again
someone counts the creases
on a bloated Buddha belly

*
Only very sharp thinking is clear:
so sharp that almost no one wants to touch it.
All other thinking is huddling together, or mating, in a
darkness in which we whisper sweet nothings.

*
She will never come. Do not listen.
Do not wait. Expect nothing.
Unlearn to expect. Unlearn waiting.
Learn to unlearn to listen. Unlearn.

*
That love could sour so.
Love which was so full of golden cream.
Hatred which is such thin whey.

*
________________

Two and eighty years

After so many years I dare bring homage

to your proud heart, to your pride:
dare say that you (you) my beloved,
three or ten small Sistine choirs in me sing

Before, earlier: your hatred against my pride,

when your own I-mushroom in you grew

35
more about Thomas than chastity I knew
before this holy homage here did grow.
*
In simplicitate cordis

Mistakes one should never refute:

but only speak the truth. Mistakes,
they are thousandfold; the truth is
single, old.
*
Karoo village: summer evening

The late afternoon has turned to cream

and trains which whistle from afar and a
white-speckled shepherd-bird which on a
clod does dream

and smoke from the township smokes and

there’s singing at the village dam and
people walk in tennis clothes
into the copper dusk

high-up on the national road

small cars are running, unheard, far;
Uncle-Abby-Abattoir’s ancient bike
stops, by itself, outside the bar

Aunt-Tilly-with-the-cancer comes to
sit on the boarding house’s stoep
tonight again we’ll hear her howls to
the Lord and to the owls.
*

When saying good evening, one must be good to

those who were greeted thus of an evening;
because the night is there to be tender in,
and the day is hard, and the morning sad,
mostly: we are not of earth that is pure. Our
labour does not gladden our hearts; we are
as yet incomplete world.

*
___________________

GREAT ODE

1 Far lovelier it is
to go into death’s crevice
- inquisitive explorer – with
all desire abandoned,
creeping furtively, hand on the rock wall
- even becoming a hand in a glove –
than to roam around in this
burning city

where tens of thousand tons of

36
 potatoes, cabbages and grain
from cranes, shovels, spoons, by
chemical metamorphosis
is digested into tons of human flesh which
will again buy grain and cabbage and say:
that they love;
even demand love! With what right? Without
end. It proceeds.
Is a star – one of the cold ones! –
not suddenly going to thunder down with ‘No!’!
Aloofness is vast
and an answer.

We do not know how painful we

lie in God’s hand; the rock not of
his lying or his lying askew; and
earth also not of heaviness or of
pain:
our pain finds no answer. Why
desire an answer:
words release: have end;
thus are no end.

We do not know we do not know

how deep love lies
those who say it know not
those who know it say not

Let it be wrapped in
white: snow, slumber, or
illusion of Being, or
virginity:
pure is no one, or everything; and
virgins, they are not pure:
are full of biological tricks
play, yes, even erotically with God.

43 Those who know, who have been known,

they are without the veil, leave the expectation,
travel in a ship, a definite one,
and yet will not be defined themselves. No
crane can hoist the bitterness, and no ship
can cart it away.

We like firm cities – we do not like ships: Of

solid ships then – not yet of water; and then
of water water on which to float,
and then of diving in water, but we still cling to
the oxygen, to the prerequisites of the lungs:
dare not, will not dare to bend asymptomatically to a
bent-away surface and
never to touch, to be pure-yet-knowing, to
be thus. This is our human condition.

37
 People can have the knowledge: that is mathematics. But:
not us: we want something else.

60 The gravity of what is said:

that we do not see; yet something of “gravity”, “terror”.
- two almost familiar concepts
that are played with
and which is a game of the heart.
We also know of “play”:
it is all embalmed, and contained in
words acquired later.
Shut-off by mica-thick spectacles
we sometimes dare to see the universe flicker for
a moment. No more.

71 Bats hang
like figs
on a branch
before this eye,
stir against the roof,
start to swell

break
open up

fall with a curve

through the night
away from me (that
was light!) nothing
has weight in the
stone room
nothing falls after me:

I am the no-desire
(the holy love
is thoroughly avenged)

and I, yes, this I:

I become an eye
a single eye, and
mediaevally pure
intellect.

This turned life is mine, therefore,

and must be lived. Untouchable am
I: insulated in sin,

38
 or by the first dam that was built before
people – perhaps it is the same.

I have heard: of ice ages, successively.

Let the new joy be heard then!

Ice is glorious: the red fox turns white, the
eider duck turns clear white
and snow birds walk on the white ice
with only the yellow eyes showing. The nature of white is such
that one veers left
and always walks in circles to the left. Rabbits are
white. Seals conceitedly black.

But this is our ice, I have heard, further:

that ice is our constant guardian angel,
and that all the great cities through this attention lie
under ice caps; and that already
it happened and happened yesterday: Rome, Persepolis, are
after-wash, flotsam, moraine, stone heap
of spite and retreating ice;
and Christ came to die last night:
after-wash of God on earth.
Severe this is, and lovely.

And lovely things remain lovely, would

in the new cave still be lovely: bisons
and arrow and spear; and something we
will keep of “fire” god of the ice caves.

What will be Love’s sign

in the new caves, bear rooms? She:
the eternal: - spear? or bison?
Forma, or signum? Her hieroglyph?

What about our thinking? What that was given of

sanctified lives? Knowledge of saintliness?
Francis? Simeon the Stylite?

We will build barricades, we: the Spirit: the

Rovers around our earth:
and we shall never be snowed under.

133 But other, other ice clamours for attention

- loose are the strains of thought –
unlit, green-paved layers,

39
 unpierced through these splits or cracks will
not be pushed back out of the world gather
gather sunlight into his crust
joy falls into this abyss
holds in the cold kernel his own nature
together with fellow sufferers and sharers of his destiny those
who were world and could accept ice
do not shine, will not, never! be known
besiege, besiege him constantly lower wants
everything equalised to his nature.

146 Thus far, then, of ice.

Dying itself is actually only a system;

therefore: apparently an action,
but still all system.
Much we do know: much which lies outside the
grasping of vision,
or of thinking. Thought is sly:
smeared over the cartilage for mucosa.

154 Oh bitter heart: another heart is bitter,

and bitter not through own doing: but through you:

this pain can fold closely round your grief! Look,

Glass face!: another cheek is whiter.

And don’t sit calling on the road:

- look you here: Where is a grief like unto mine! one
knows your pain: you are ignorant of His: Onto Him
was forced all our pain’s attention.

Somewhere it bellows and bellows over the

earth fills the basins between the mountains
radial waves from bassoons and through this pain the
Himalayas and the Pamirs are submerged Heracles
becomes pus and putrefaction
all the many, newly-born gods seek
original and own destructions.

a god who does not have pain: that is rejectable or

Greek. Even if I could think him,
even if he exists! – I would look upon his calm omnipotence
without power, enraged, but with a proud neck:
- and not only on account of my pain -:

40
eternal expanse of water without ripple
smug with self-inspection
gazer, lover, in eternal mirrors – (I
know that my word fails! –
But even a bourgeois miss with white-golden crown of
white paper, from beauty contests
she has more Being than this.) And allowing to think is
Flame: Living is Being or Blaze.

We dare not worship other gods before

This Face or: allow to be worshipped.
That, that at least, we know – we continue knowing He
is a finger, hand, or hand gesture,
or sleight of hand. These are my words.
His words cause super-novae to erupt, beam,
beam and shine through rings and light-hours. But
the shining is seen by us:
otherwise never and never known as shining.

The eruption and bursting forth, then – perhaps even from love -
without caring about knowing or being known of:
that is His. Ours is this: existing (no matter how small), keep existing with:
precision; a little pride; and ample love;
and endless forgiveness for everything:

nobody finds harmony with the universe;

rightly we should learn to live ironically: and:
within irony still keep love.

And hereby we return along the circular stairway

and the spirals down to other years:
become druids of our fullest knowledge,
become – masked – chisellers on stones,
turners of stones to something less
- yes! – than pyramids: yet certainly guardians
of the first knowledge of “gods”.

silent, more silent will it grow Heart,

my heart, you fear so much that the world
will never flow
along the paths you desire so

never soluble in synthesis

heart, my heart, we suspect it all;
this adamic embarrassment
was in apples at the fall

41
 silent, still more silent will it grow
- each silence yet more pleasing now –silent:
not to listen;
silent: and inaudibly sweet.

218 The white ship walks into the water

- traced by hundreds of eyes
like searchlights
fingering –
out, out of the clanging harbour, in
against the wind which
freer than flags
or the gray cruiser is
a shining racer
above the water

Man is nausea
and he hates the
sign.
Or shuns it, negates it.

a bird calls into the night:

not nightingale but unrest,
crying out to that which from him differs;
- the sacred and the whole -
other names still slumber.

- N.P.van Wyk Louw, from "Groot ode" in Tristia, 1962:123-133. Inspired

by the poet's visit to the Altamira cave in September 1953, see the Louw
biography by JC Steyn (vol II:686) that mentions the visit to Santander).
______________

42
 A SELECTION OF PRISON POEMS BY BREYTEN BREYTENBACH (1975-1983)

(My translation of some of the poems in the five Breytenbach prison collections, which have not been translated in
Judas Eye (1988), but which are essential for a thorough grasp of his prison poetry. They are given here in
chronological order - according to the dates on which they were written - and not according to the publication dates
of the different volumes.)

I. Voetskrif (1976)(poems written during Breytenbach's detention in 1975)

pp. 38-39 19

after many years I was set free

but at home in the enormous flat building
I realise that the warder has neglected
to hand over my pawned house keys
and all the storeys the doors look the same

I was invited to a conference

but when I arrived I had to see
through soundproof glass doors
how my mutual conferees and friends
wave to me and depart

and I became lazarus drunk

together with people whose language
I do not understand the glasses
burst open my tongue cling like a flag
to my teeth in the mirror

is my face that of
James Dean with dark glasses and beard stubble
and blubberswell goiters in the neck -
in the long corridors an electrical broom
chased me and my back was lame

I go on holiday to a beach place

and the sea and the rain is howling and groaning
the motorboats are shattered against the rocks
that evening there are visions
in the neighbouring town

but I do not have a motor car;

in the bathroom in a glass my wife
has planted a little seed yes it comes up
in the leaves it has already been written
that it will be a human man

after all the years I buy a wonderful book

with exquisite illustrations but when my relatives
hear of the price there is shouting
and spitefully I tear the book open page for page:
(then I saw) it was: the interpretation of IMAGES

******

43
pp. 49-50 26
(poem on toilet paper)

overnight everything is indeed possible

this huge red building which I inhabit,
its cement passages and its steel barriers,
fades away - only floodlights and lonely warders
try to keep up the shine in high towers;
the jail becomes a monastery

from my bed I take the pillow

and roll it up tightly - this is my zafu,
in front of the wall inside the sacred space I make sampaï
because deep in my ears is the hollow sound
of the wood fish being gonged
and I cross my legs and my breathing
there where I cannot see anything,
to thus again return to reality

or yet: through the walls break all the maja's:

the spouting desires, the flames
in the crotch - the images of my world,
how deep will this land keep on living within me?
that the heart may never become blunt!
till the corpse is thrown out on the town square
and the dogs devour it
and only manure remains on the acres -
kill that which has not lived!

but it also fades -

the inner quad becomes an oasis for night birds,
the moon has grown feathers!
outside a tree stands on its toes
to peer inside,
everything intensifies:
tries to pierce through and to
that which is tacked timelessly,
(stacked-up time) ( )

but that also fades -

the ruptures close up again,
in the endless space I do kin hin
and listen to the breath
which comes and goes
till it will stop coming
and will go

when it becomes light

I gashô for the white wall,
I sit in the sun's snow
and put down my chopped-off arm
on the writing book:
a flower for the silence

44
 round about is the jail
the way has no end.
but what does it matter?
******

pp. 58-60 29

wife, it must almost be autumn now

in your region - (ours, before...)
the yellow evenings of summer are past
and it sits on the terrace bathing in the wind
till the starfires burn with a dark smoke

yet, in their space presently comes

the perfection and stateliness of other clouds
flags above the city, autumn is departure
and arrival, immersion, change;
the trees in the park, like old kings,
will be dreaming round-headedly of bygone glory, hung
with the medallions and memories of earlier campaigns,
and with the sighs and breaths the golden shreds
flutter into the brooms and the baskets of the street sweepers

now you will have to come home earlier, wife,

so that darkness or criminals do not overtake you on the street
remember, I will not be waiting in front of the hearth
any more for your footsteps;
there still remains a bit of fuel in the tank
for heating, and when it is done
you know where to order more, ask Petitloup
to come and sweep the chimney before winter's sharpness
and to check whether the windows still shut tightly enough
for safety's sake and wolves and fear;
also the leaking pipe in the cellar must be mended,
and all the other marks of the year's wear and tear

I know you will look after my books

and now and then have dealings with the old typewriter
but if you find it necessary to extinguish
my traces, then that will also be in order -
because I am not in the autumn
and remnants only spoil;
you must be strong, my wife,
you must not cry -
you are now the man in the house

what I have, is little,

are shreds and mourning - but look, if there is space
behind this writing, then it is all yours:
I am also with you every hour of the day at every table
in every bus or conversation, even the smallest meanest work,
when you are meditating or tilt-headedly listening to Dylan or Mozart
or when it rains and the snow again comes to cover all -
I am at your shoulder and your forehead
as the bird loves the freedom of his flight

45
and when you go to sleep, yes
you may now warm my place at night -
when the flags come folding over frost and rooftop
and wind washes like the sea against a counter reef
so that the roof panes creak -
I know that you will listen to the roof panes creaking -
allow me then to come to you in your dreams
like the lover of yesteryear -

(oh Zeus, Jehova-who-only-is,

Osiris the Maimed and Hat-hor of Love,
of Brahma Creator, Warder Vishnu,
Sjiva who destroys and renews, oh
Mithra of the Sun,
allow that I may then expose my wife's loneliness
and protect!)

******

pp. 61-63 30

the fear came upon him

that everything would fall away from him
in this place where he has nothing
and that he would not exist for anyone any more

"my dearest", thus he loaded the ship

of his breath with words and sightlessly
scratched over the paper,
"your breasts are two broody doves which
together on the nest love each other,
your neck is a way to paradise,
your eyes are the lapping and the movement
which hides behind the flames, at night,
your hair is the wind from the vineyards
and the pomegranate bushes, summers
at the foot of the honey mountains,
your stomach is as private and as pulsing
as a newly born little animal -
but what does it help me now
while you are not here?"

"old shoe", he went confessing under the bed

"you who are now so old and full of broken tongues
resoled with the round earth's erosion
you as gray as a decomposed soul -
it is a small step, a weakening only, a changing of the word
between the deed and death -
I have tamed you, your shell
my foot and I stick to you
because she meant you for me,
she took you from the show-reflecting window -
but what does it help me now
while she is not here?"

46
"and you, dead ant" - on the floor - "armoured soldier
what fear or dumb reconnaissance trip did ban you
here out of your freedom to be pulverised by accident?
you were perhaps gaping at the dimensions of my cell -
more magnificent would it be for you, more graceful and embellished
than Mussolini's most grandiose spectacle or wildest dream,
or could you not see with your eyes full of beard?
come, you of the torn body -
I want to introduce you to the shreds of my shoe
because you knew her hand
and you knew that of the sun - only thus are we a chain
so that nothing may be lost unseen"

***

after the above he looked at his scribbling:

like the convulsions of an ant it was,
like the smear of a shoe become senile,
and the fear existed for him
like a connecting link -

what does it all help me

as long as you are not here?

******

pp. 70-72
33

(a poem and its two breeding grounds)

("j'ai flambé ma vie...")

again he was outside in the exercise yard

with the knowledge that he had to take survey
urgently had to look around;
the walls loom large above him, left and right,
front and back; and also behind that front and back
and right and behind; there are locks and locks on every door
and doors behind doors: a labyrinth for the minotaur
so closed off from the world's reality
that everything thinkable becomes possible!

he does not know whether he has a soul -

a KA, a being point, count-it-up, a spiderbeakstripe
from fly to fly - but something under the sun
smells of decomposing, and he is part of it;
also that which is invisible untouchable uncountable dies
but what dies must yet have lived!

he searches for a mirror, that which could

give him a view of himself or flash an emergency signal
to the sun - but look,
the mirror is a white word -
and ink stains his thoughts, the pools are stained,
the clouds submerged

47
because the outside is missing - in his mouth
he tastes her eyes: ("I have scavenged the mousetrap for you
with my heart!")

what then? it must be possible to lead the thought

to the heights, train the questioning mind as acrobat,
a diver into heights
eternally tumbling and swinging
in the birdcage of the head!

that which thinks cannot be divorced from the thought

he is an antheap, he then thought,
and the damned black words eat up the thought
unless they go astray and dragged along by the poem
are drowned)

because exercise book is butcher's block, page is blood bath,

word is murder - or becomes, and is that not the same? -
just as wall is also wound, and hand a hound
as a dog which goes back to his vomit
is an idiot who hauls up his madness again

will he be able to flee with it? is the prisoner

free outside the walls? will the ant and the man of heights
expose the world on the other side?
"like the legs of the lame one hangs down limply,
this is the wise saw in the mouth of the idiot"
let the mirror then be reality
and reality a mirror

above him the sky was as big

and as perished and as unthinkable as ice,
and while he was still searching for his image
which had to shine there
he saw the ice begin to burn
with a cold blue flame

(and it is good thus)

*******

p.88
3

(my country in winter)

(ii) sea storm at the Cape

Cabo de los Tormentos

a thousand ships sunk in your immeasurable depths

ten thousand contorted mouth-hollows yell
so that the white foam bubbles
and throw flecks of sputum against my hotel window
until high against the mountain slopes the emergency signals flap
the table cloth shreds are being sucked into abysses
the seagulls shudder and petrify of a revolting fear
48
the sea vomits and shrills of an ancient pain

ants have hollowed out the ocean -

the rafts are being shattered
against the teeth of the land:

(I dream my night in measured units

in the darkness I am boss
of the spaceless space
the dark hope of the white ants

(I am the admiral of my dreams

who sets up and orders the navy squadrons of water ants
to consume the living fruit
until the backbone snaps
and the day breaks

(so that in the momentary rest of the clear hours

I am the victor
Napoleon in Wellington
free like a blind man behind bars

(and dimly seeing)

******

pp. 95-97

(v) North, for M.W.S. and F.O.

in his umuzi which is smoke larger and sadder than eGoli

in the bruised and therefore aromatic shadow of his khonza
umDali told me of life and death

of the lizard and the chameleon

messengers each with only a single message in his body and in the
barrel
one golden tongue drop
to carry over to man
with that gold to clothe cell and heaven

chameleon little mangy one turncoat

had to reveal: man is immortal;
lizard with the chilled colour of the sword
had to decide: man is death material

and the one messenger was there before the other

because one stayed weighing and dreaming too long on a flower
was weighed and found too light

that was earlier and always

bright day, bright day

clear note of sun's ray in the winter
in a country where thunder and lightning trumpet summer
where lightning shatters tunnels in the heavens
49
and the mines are steaming full of cloud falls
shaya! (hit it!) shisa! (burn him! shoot!)

my foot would wander searchingly over these hollow streets

but in my whole long life I would never
learn to love this metropolis

this is the end of the journey

this is the terminus
and with my body heavy of head shit and heart cancer
mummied in a hat a coat and other man's shoes
I walked to where jackals on every street corner
howl clearly -
of the construction on which my flesh hangs
they would make flutes

I had dealings with the enemy

my eyes became entangled in the eyes of the enemy
with his eyes he held mine
the better for to stab me in the back

we are part of the new generation who will not see

the new season dawn
but we will bring this disgrace which is of our own body
to an end
and on my route the lizard waited
the heart a throbbing abscess in the throat
the eyes the two cold crossed swords
which cuts the protecting wordskin from me

oh Johannesburg! o alla basie, what did I do?

it is now and it is here
because the one messenger was there before the other
because the other stayed pondering too long on a flower,
was weighed, and found too heavy

******

II. Lewendood (1985) (poems written in May 1976)

p. 25 it's the white sun

of judgement as rumour
it's a yard of blue sky
blocked out by bars
and a bird turns in lonely magical flight -
that's all.

it's an exile come

over the ocean
it's the bird's carcass
cold in the heart's ashes
and time which stalls in a closed cell -
that's all.

******

50
p. 87

2.14
look here!
the poem is absence

the hanging of a human being

is only a somewhat simplified illustration
of the old Indian rope trick

the chosen climbs up as supple as a rat

against the stiffly standing rope in the sky -
and disappears

******

pp. 116-117 3.2 (tracker)

thus it is also
(I cannot help it: am an expressive animal
even if I express what is not there
to be expressed: only this:
and the poem
is experiential organ is visual motor
even when it only experiences the nothing:)

I write
about what I cannot see about
what I cannot touch with the ear and the skin -
memories then?
but are memories not imagination?
only this
the memories are the non-existent world dreamt
are the ring around the lost homing pigeon's little leg
I am the man of Midnight
my breast has wings
my backbone an aerial
my pen is a gong between teaspoon teeth

also about stars treed by the wind and moon

about the sea like the woman about music with new boots
about friends about ice-cream about the mountain of irreality
about curtains cigars a dove
about what does not exist
about miracles
in other words
about a cup of tea
and I fall over the words which I write
about the writing
only this:

51
I am the watch without eyes
I am Beethoven's piano with tails
the invisible ink in the ledger
the hunting hound with dried up tonsils
without space suit I walk in Pretoria's
moon up the one side
and up the other side

I am Christ's diary
the fever fart in Tutankhamon's body house
Napoleon's love for Josephine in 1912
the travel itinerary of the Wandering Dutchman
the worm in the side of the great Titanic
the bramble bush monologue
I am the shaman's other I

forgive me then: only this: that

the heart runs off with the hand through the tongue
because running is running
keeps on running away
from: thus it is also
thus far:

and love is also to keep on moving and making tracks:

******

p.149 4.2 (Thirdparty; a duet)

locked up accompanied with the self as company

and sounding board: a morbid eye guards red veinedly
over the morbid body, the watch as grave stone
over the fleshy garden and the flesh
underground with tunnels and shafts
for rat and marrow. the eye
with his worms the worm
is eye; I play
a piano with slithering black notes

something, something, anything to touch

what lies outside us both, a gesture
of friendship - love is done: and we
together bedded in sterility like two whores -
a tree with autumn leaves, a boat
with the clear line of speed even,
anything further than this watch with leg-
hands, and this cyclopic
stinking tictac hole

the bars are ribs, the worm

chokes in the whore, the little veins vein red
in tomb's white perdition;
what I am not I cannot see,
I cannot be what I cannot see
but the I and the see are already two
in vain; and then to sound off
52
about the poetic activity? that deeply faulted state?
will we then make notes measure for measure?

******

pp.155-8
4.5 (A preliminary elegy)
for warder Opperman

Which tree's bitter root

which bone of the turtle-dove

will protect the heart against evil

and heal it of its loneliness?
- D.J.O.

... and
you fell through a tear in heaven
on the screen of plaited steel
above our patch of garden disguised as
pleasure-garden, but actually a trap.
probably came searching worms or seed
when you saw us and got a terrible fright:
to come in is child's play
to blossom forth is a different hell

even if you were Captain Marvel.

your friend (your gauge) struggled away
and you pecked bewildered with feather
and beak at the locks,
searched with wings aflutter for a ledge
or sky. blood makes tracks against grayer wall
and a little handful of pen feathers raw at the drain:
the grave's a fine and private place.

to save you I had to catch you

and restrain: you wriggle like a snake
over the cement: God! how beautiful!
a stately sunwashed boat
entrusted with the Farao's silence
between life and death and the Nile,
blue almost purple against the flank
and rust colour of red around the crop

and throat, but watch out for the falcon!

blue is your colour and your dimension,
a bird out of the sky is broken
a tear without material - my dove,
my lamb, my lame-winged, wretched
sideways walking dove, am I your executioner?
the little brave heart in your chest
throbs a fear in my fingers,

oh broken arrow: the dead head-

soil of Medusa the Gorgon also dripped
blood and thus is Africa
53
pestered by reptiles: the chain
of my hands in which you hang
will from now on have to feed you prison bread
your blue blood I will keep indoors
like mildew in gorgonzola cheese.

how dare I fence you in my cell,

humble you to my floor and footscript, me
a little flap just like you? must you
console yourself in this hole with the
harsh joke: prison is the continuation
of freedom by other means?
on which grounds as boss could I
decide that you had to become bait here?

violin and flute still make a sound

because the yard is wide and the wedding
large. Don't fret, you still will
learn to know the sound. Outside space is dead.
I did not catch you but only
your fear: the dolphin's smile
is the line of his back to destruction
the tortoise kills himself in carrying his coffin.

(the tame baboon walks through the wood

and plays on his tin guitar, his hands
are bound and his feet are loose and his breath
stinks of sewer...) I will baptise you:
King David? Lenin? Paloma? Colombe?
Yonnati? Pax? Pax? Old man Hard-arse?
no. I call you warder Opperman
or just wO, because in the palace1

of the blind one-eye is warder -

(here they are called "vultures" or should
it really be "arse birds"? oh wO,
shall I tame you? subservient? because what dies
in you is the nature of your freedom.
Your will still learn to know the sound in your heart
and glide upwards with stronger wings.

if I had a porthole I would throw

you to pray whether you could find an olive branch,
but we do not farm with olives.
our bodies have long ago become as blind as a bath
and Birth is an old-old book.
and wO, it is now too late to search
in you for king Neptunus's child.
The baby turns the bath water red.

1 *(El Palacio de Miedo, in the little town of Dis)

54
 ...and
I keep you on like wings in my corpse
and hope that the pen feathers grow again.
you sit cornered with an eye dark global mirror
an olive aimed at my dark writing:

do you also want to look on God's table? you are

inner space breath in my poem a mate
to talk to who cannot answer.

where will this little rhyme cause our shipwreck?

in what slime? in what blossoming?
which Salome will dance for the platter?
and who will find goodwill in us?

******

III. Buffalo Bill (1984) (Poems written between June 1976 and June 1977)

pp. 35-36 The Condemned

1. (pact)
in the section a prisoner is perhaps dreaming
of a little bush, and of words as large
(as a pair of scissors) -
he snores like an old blunt toothed ewe

oh Shepherd,
give that Abraham yet rather
slaughters little I-sac;
and save me!

2 (moon during the day)

the white anti-presence of a peppermint
which has already been sucked?

or the flying dutchman

the wandering barque of cold sand
in the sea without water
searching bottom or a wave's
flames
and always flounders again
against nothing?

the day grown into the self assurance of white

stick, and in the blue dazzle hangs
irrational and unpolished the moon:
the silver skull disfigured
with pocks and the smooth sleep
of worms
that we might remember the night
brings decay
of eye and cheek

55
the tow of absence?
the unplacable thing?
a carriage full of flour?
the neglect and transport of imagination?

thus is the brain, thus is thought -

3 (the launching)
look the condemned the last slither days
how attentively and precisely he studies the Book -
it is cramming-time now for the entry exam
to finality
when the seaweedgray-rusted amen
will be thrown
overboard
and he (bold candidate)
resiliently cabled to the twists
of the blue rope in the harbour will
bob up and down like a ship

******

p. 38 The execution

it's five o'clock in the morning

the birds sing
they who will presently depart upwards sing

perhaps today they will

still learn to fly
but tomorrow morning the birds will sing again

******

p. 70 The Departure

early this morning the silver points of the aeroplane wing

would have flamed like a two-edged sward in the blue,
weaving over the sneer and the brain of my Nomansland firmament
away, always further, at last to where cloud space builds
over another, softer continent; within the borders
and meditation of my bars in imagination's cage
I hear the droning: and see how your eye tries
to stay strong over the flickering of Africa - but now,
while you speed over the map of shadows with memories'gravestone
the outlines of skeletons - the heart a vampire! - now I mourn
over your cloud-soft flesh, over us, our wound, thed eparture
from my staying-put, my love, we will remember the cold summer
united! alone blue-dropped where words become sparser
travels your flight far a needle prick through the heart of paper

19 xii 76

******

56
p. 71
Time

another hour another day those stupid un-its

from time to time my heart can lead you into another bed
no pretended end of existence of the knife's slide
through the fibres which bind us neither the wind
of the never past nor the pitfalls ahead or insanity's knowledge:
all dreamings!
no war or peace or sky shuddering's decay will divorce us
not even nights with coats and hats and every sheath
and city full of cutripe star abscesses: nothing has the power
over our love: therefore: oh little butterfly please live! may
my powerlessness carry you in all your fluttering beauty
past the signs of temporality where like a laugh
in the sob the white skeleton waits in the dark ground -
even if it is only a little while: another hour another day...

******

p. 77 Possession

why should you mope?

you still have a tongue in the cheek
and plenty on which to chew
and a nose in the sneeze:
(those belong to you!)

******
The struggle for the taal2

'Clean as the conscience of a gun' - Miroslav Holub

We are old.
Our language is a grey reservist of a hundred years and more
with fingers stiff around the triggers -
and who will be able to sing as we sang
when we are no longer there?
As we did when alive we will spurn the earth
and the miracles of the flesh which groans
throbbing and flowing like words -
It is you who will serve as bodies for our thoughts
and live to commemorate our death,
you will conjure up tunes from the flutes of our bones...

from the structure of our conscience

from the stores of our charity
we had black constructions built for you, you bastards -
schools, clinics, post-offices, police-stations -
and now the plumes of black smoke blow
throbbing and flowing like a heart.

2 Translated by Breytenbach in The True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist, pp. 323-

325 (Taurus, 1984)

57
But you have not really understood.
You have yet to master the Taal.
We will make you repeat the ABC after us,
we will teach you the ropes
and rigours of our Christian National Education...

You will learn to obey,

to obey and be humble.
And you will learn to use the Taal,
with humility you will use it
for it is we who have the sunken mouths
poisoned with the throbbing and flowing of the heart.

You are the salt of the earth -

with what will we be able to spice our dying
if you are not there?
You will turn the earth bitter and brackish, glinting
with the sound of our lips...

For we are Christ's executioners.

We are on the walls around the locations
gun in one hand
and machine-gun in the other:
we, the missionaries of Civilization.

We bring you the grammar of violence

and the syntax of destruction -
from the tradition of our firearms
you will hear the verbs of retribution
stuttering.

Look, we are giving you new mouths for free -

red ears with which to hear red eyes with which to see all
pulsing, red mouths
so you can spout the secrets of our fear:
where each lead-nosed word flies
a speech organ will be torn open...

And you will please learn to use the Taal,

with humility use it, abuse it...
because we are down already, the death rattle
throbbing and flowing
on our lips...

We ourselves are old...

(from: Lewendood, 1985, pp. 143-144)

******

58
IV. Eklips (1983) (Poems written between the middle of 1977 and the middle of 1979)

p. 43 The Mountain

the mountain, so I imagine, fort

where primeval black shadows
(thought spectres) can lie hidden from the light
the mountain is full of herbs and sweet old smells

in the night when out of the stronghold

darkness comes
the sweet old smells of healing plants bruised
perhaps by an unexpected goat's claw
or simply the opening of extinct flowers
the temple-making, the hallowing wide

then I have to think of you, exile

(even though I am shut up in this superior thinking!)
that you cannot smell this night's joy
cannot become sweetened by deep sadness
and perhaps will have to taste a strange soil

but then I think further: imagination

and memory is one sweet mountain
and with the clods in our mouths we are
gray communal recumbent possession

your tracks now cross over another beach

yet we each cherish the yearning for one
mountain high fire
which will purify the darkness
and may be the silence

mountain of alliance between you and me

mountain of ecstasy
mountain of appeasement
bitter sweet mountain of irreality

******

p. 65
4.3

in the jug they gave me a watch

to hold onto time
and it then stopped
(jug? watch? time?)

the white visage with the small black wrinkles

was opened to see what was wrong -
screws taken out and shallowly dissembled
checked up and blown on all the little filoplumes
small cogwheels flywheels oscillating movement dead
silver sound which turns dust
rubies forty mirrors a house a mountain
polished with clouds a hive city's unending
59
 curled-in space amorphous tabula rasa nights beautiful
love a snake as thick as the earth
chokes and everything which could still be wrong
up to the tock and then nothing more
(and time freed a swishing dark wing beat) -

'there is the problem' they said:

'it's nothing'
(jug? watch? time?)

******

p. 67 7.4

Alcatraz this might not be

but I also know
all about the bird
and his small white seeds

******

p.68 9.

when I stand on the head in my night on the floor

I hear the warm whining of jetmotors
and that pulsing promise of orange flame spitters
will transport me over the black parabole far away to my home

******

p. 69 10.2

all these dead nights

the ash heap mornings

******

p. 80 4.

Like a baboon I also grow gray towards evening

time, timid, filled with fear of falling when
the earth wanders off from the sun and falls, continually falls
through the endless trapdoors of the flight: death is
a flight-and-fall. How strange that senile and fertile
may rhyme so that death becomes an unconsciousness, a heel
for the wind-sock who wants to assure itself of life,
and that this which now has the green taste of gall
with the mythical morning once more heals the heel and the eel
if meanwhile words can burn out in flight.
Leave the heart then to leak and the tongues to gnash -
I hide meanwhile knee deep in the poem
because you know me, know who I am:
the night strangler, the fuckin' terrorist!

******

60
p.90 14.

your honour, the best charge and summons to catch jackal

who howls like a stricken soul moonthin in the kloof
is to bury a slaughterous trap meticulously -
but first wash clean the iron law of precedent and stench
of previous death agonies - and spread a weighty document
over the plate which will activate the teeth
with lightly lightly on top a fine layer of soil; put next to
this
an old sacrificial cock as bait even if it is deaf with
the bone-white arguments of the inner order again
legibly and powerfully patterned; then wipe clean
all previous traces of your honourable person's slyness
and spray holy water everywhere so that the dazzling earth
can give innocent aroma and the jackal may come and scratch
mesmerised by the promise of life

******

p. 93 17.

the little patches of green growth are gray with cold

dry worms everywhere in each foundation and fold
of city and country dignitary's wives
have turned their plump backs on mother apparently
because her pronunciation does not swosh and fit natonal
and ladieslook enough and father was sitting next to the empty
veranda potplant tin when two fighter aeroplanes shot through
the dusky firmament
each with flags full of weak words of "no more war"
and also "peace" and when the last mentioned exploded one
clattered down, pegasus black
here in the dry garden: a blunt horseshoe; but my poem long
parole was past and I was already on my way back a frightened
arse throb through the evening streets past the deserted Masonic
Hotel where drunken
Renaissance reproductions hang to be searched into the most
secret
bodily passages and locked in irons: in jail

******

V ('YK') (1983) (Poems written between October 1979 and November 1982)

p.24

some click regrettably with the tongues

and call this place Eziqwaqweni
- the house where robbers stay -;
others say no it's much more like
a graveyard where one can me-di-tate
and therefore it should be called Dlinza;
but I know already you will get lost here
in your labyrinthine search for opening
61
from pontius to little peter to pole:
here your half brothers stick you arse-hole-naked
into an old boghole - indeed kwaDukuza
- precisely the place of the lost person -

******

p. 39 Sounds

("écrire... pour diminuer les doses de réalité en les évacuant...

la littérature était pour moi une défécation salutuaire.")

in these days already closing so cold and blue

winter's butterflies are the black fat flies
which crawl like syllables on the walls and
congeal in the cracks, also searching for non-existent ways

of growth. perhaps (you think) there might yet be

a channel crack of after bleeding from these hours, a chance
to symbolise somewhere outside the imagined coital dance

in little eggs laid in dung heaps

so that the gilded orchids may germinate prematurely
but the brain's blue blossoms carry the naked knowledge
of only one sortie and sort of orgy for ideas:

you squat sadly over the notebook to once more

become denuded of the infertile pain
to evacuate death word for word

(81/5/31)

p.68 Moon Dove

there is the hollow and there is that

which fits into the hollow;
and the two together, the duality
and the unity at once, then there is
the total past absence of that which now is
like the egg is a bird out of itself and the hand
a thought hollow in the seed sock
of some and/or other pitiful soul
because here the future absence is also
the word as skeleton of the willing word,
my body in a century,
the yawn drowned in printer's ink;
I now give the pen in Miguel Cervantes's left hand
that he here this is Miguel the Dutiful his little cross: X:
but you must slide your understanding damned fast into the
hollow surroundings of communication:
understand - the underside and the stand (joke!)
that there is here, even the absent and -sense of that
which never was, like for instance, space.

the space thus and that which makes this space,

62
smoke, war, the kicking on the rope,
the sliding equilibrium in the lever,
the yell with its silence: X:
everything which is gesture, which is dreamt, never imagined
is reality's being-and-not-being from non-start
to non-ending; because it is so it is so
that you may know it with prajna
(and if it is unknowable you will never know it).

here is the flight of the gull

who have landed on the mountain
without feet.

******

pp. 78-79

in very corner of this cell

I keep a long-legged spider -
it is not official, but what is?

to empty out time to disrupt consciousness

to the self-hypnosis of a metronome
that dreams bars and skulls and I's
apparently is official -
so absolutely free to search within the gates of absence
to spin the hubs of conversation or to search
for being and destination
that actually you cannot have a choice
(how strange to arrive more or less
and to forget about the journey...)

I watch how they - with long joints

like energetic Provencal magicians at the spinning wheel -
sprout specks of spittle to carve space into definition
to fence it off clearly
in a robe of invisibility, the trousseau
which has to discover the virginity -
eternal dialogue between habitat and beak
or with the rhythmic movements of the ballerina
to concertina with a mate
who must be caught by the thrill-ring

sex? perhaps it has already been completed in the dark,

perhaps the little women have already devoured the impregnators
to retain the tense rocking -
are they now dreaming of mummies?
the breeding place of other growing little bodies?
food? it seems to be of little importance:
one has almost caught a little fishmoth as footnote
to also hang this silveriness in a sensitive net of silence;
look, they do not protest and they do not sing
and yet each is a living cancer,
anchored in his own council chamber of threaded reflection

63
I name them: I namename them Mictlan,
Headspin, Tajin and Djanet
and begrudge them the unmentionable dribbling sentence
("with reference to my writing of such-and-such II.
I only want to point out...")
which reduces the senselessness from time to time
and silk sliminess will twine over the skin
of the own carcass of stench and monologue sound -
officially the unmentionable I is perhaps nothing more
than only absence kept by a long-legged spider
in each corner of this cell -

******

pp. 81-82

typical Peninsular dampness of mourning

clouds for coat and plastic and shoes and boats
birds bruised blue under one gray blanket of
rain, a virginal rain muffling against the glass
there that bandit in a smile down to the bone
exposed plays fink stinger with his breath in the mirror:
'it's a day for bean soup and sweet potatoes
and a small jug of sweet wine as sultry as the steer's
blood of pourriture noble and red with summersod's joy
an ideal day for pulling mullet
on Woodstock beach
when the waves are pushing more and more curlingly
especially now that the snoek has been lean
this season like the calves and green heels
of kanallas and those who rinse washing in the rain
publicly snapped in Human and Animal Locomotion
of Eadweard Muybridge'

second stanza
And One Dark Day silvery death weaned
at the pane pushes
time pushes time
a dusk of gods
incredibly soft and singing swaying is the rain
earth is a weak old crust
over the ringwound of memories
of rain: it will rain thigh-wet of the dance
lime old-throated, suffocating taps
old Cape Ladies with pinchers, knitting needles
tickling sticks,

deeper, water in the kloof, poorman's fun -

'who can rob me? The sun itself then plaits a garland
little 'jackal marries wolf's wife' showers and true to time
like a jackal's heart my bride my cinderella girl
with the ventricles and little tubes and grooves:
I have mastered the art of predicting the past
even if it is not all quadrate accurate'

64
'let it rain: a new regime
to cut away all the superfluous white meat from the shell
so that through this moment's membrane of glass
what is past will glide into what comes again
eternalised
nipple against the skin
eye for an eye
tongue around stulip around gong around bow
and down in down's comma and full stop
pointer against thigh
flattened
sweet shadow at the crevice too
smoke around the work's little cogwheels of silence -
rain, rain, rain'

******

p. 84

When you tore my being footloose from me

like the summery skin off a young man's body
I thought: I am as free as a bird
in the wintery jail! Nothing will affect me any more
or come and bother me between my legs
and no one will ever get a hold on me any more

but now the fear for a much more

important issue (let the politicians and makers of etiquette
reverberate and describe luscious starts new tours
kingdoms may perish gladly...): that my plate of porridge
and bread may perhaps be taken from me
seeing that stupidly I still forget the hands in the pockets

oh Lord, chain me with meekness

and protect me against them who give out punishment
like the little dove coos to live

******

p. 93

did it happen? what was a certain Mork riddle

what is on close inspection a breathing-and-giving

not flying but flesh; outside the landscape

of frozen love - the sun hangs too wilted

to come over the wall the earth an old

dead pear on the branch ('and you will consume

the fruit of your body') - there is also no time

only the hanging on of it traced in the body's

metamorphosis and ultimately the corpse is made redundant

what does it help me to be a glacier expert?

65
the fanatic lapses, shakes (and divides) the impulses
through the sieve of the poem to suffered days:

and these walls a cordon of sanitary silence

to shut in and out the rumours of a life

******

pp. 126-7 Earlymorningbirthdaypoem

(faite pour l'anniversaire de Mme Y H-L B, le 22 Mai 1981)

take a touch of Prussian blue

and brush it smoothly into each fold
of the firmament (the surface's background must of course be
slightly
damp); wash off progressively
when still wet so that
the layers of sky above the mountain's chattering teeth
may flag as grail as shallow water
over a transparent tree;
in summary: drag the star-studded flag
from the ocean and hoist it high
to dry out -

to this end: sketch with quick

brushes a rising sun even before
the halfday moths flutter deafly; also
39 singing bird in embroidered kikimono's;
a brush stroke smoke and suggest from there further
via the trees the unshowable
mountain wind only to ruffle your hair
and to lay a little shred of illusionary cherishing
in default of any significant heat
over the cold limbs: crack of dawn morning
winter moon already open
then gradually dipped in erasure's font -

then tear open this paper's illusion

and shake out the word out of the painted pillowcase
because a real day is white-bone reality

but in Paris May month is intensely beautiful

and the French rose so red
the pulsating of innovative aroma
through the streets (where bleary eyed star-knights
decipher the rhythm in the early morning); the holy heart's
domes warns like something that throbs lightly,
the Luxembourg trees are green
patch-worked the old world can still shudder
with the promise of entwined magnificence;

66
what do I wish for you? that the mountain wind
from there where there are no mountains enfold you tenderly...
and that around the corner of day's dawning your painter you
remember

******

pp. 160-3 I am here, parody

On my way through this earthly desert it happened

that I came into a place of isolation.
There I lay down and fell asleep:
and while I slept, I dreamt...

Herein lies half a truth, because for the reason that my fingers
were too cold the dream escaped me
and I had to feel how sleep
shuddered under my touch. Also, the place of bereavement of
senses

was in truth a babana, a benjaminsfig with air roots

and ornamental fruit of which I, with the unquenchable thirst for
lumen,
ate, to become an illuminator. Cut the little blue edge
quietly away and one finds silence

when the mountains are only smoke on the retina

with the soft iron smoulder of ash. Who has to
be dunked under by the heart? Light is the pyromaniac's
testament.
Each star is ore: and this country's star is becoming cold.

Granted: the other half is that it is truly dying

between robbers, rapers, murderers and psychopaths;
that is also a spending of time:
the cow knows no orgasm.

(But come and look, preferably on a Saturday morning in the quad

when tunes groaned out circle of blue eyes
cryin' in the rain, how they shadow squat, impounded dogs
under the banyan tree - and know, such is inward crying.)

I deviate... come from afar indeed

all along the curves of the funnel; inserted
where the Breë River pushes soft wet syllables over the old
mouth. Or something like that. An infix on a tribe,
with a childhood which grows to a golden youth -
a horizon full of real mountains, corn like virtue on the land,
till the flames come to stenograph, clean scorch of language
and with such other-worldly - or "deeper" - orange hats on.

67
Presently then a preludium of split between, say for instance,
paper flower and Soter. And quickly a multiplication
of intentions - sorting out, reject, lord's breakfast, click-
click,
climb bent-backedly, liplickingly, sputtering - to island a
diaspora,

that is literally a trace-making of the day. I was young

and black of beard, thick neck also from much quacking.
Selling matches on street corners in Paris
and with the dark plucking the eve's figs of love's joy.

There are movements which the lips never unlearn,

tastes tasted which the mouth cannot withstand
even when the wind blossoms black: the enigma of the other
in your heart with which you wander till the day you capsize

or with three jerks fizzle out in the hole. It's only that,
under the white stabbing sun in this tear-and-language-filled dale,
with the passing time everything fades and buds clearer.
That you must make crack with the white arse or move
mouthwrenchedly

in cabaret's circle. Because I learn that I have no grasp.

That the bird with a slip of the tongue in his call is a
starling.
That to measure your words is to whine.
That the most expensive caps are made from young dog's skin

which you must strip alive for the supple and the shine.
Or that shampoo can only be tested by dripping the concentrate
in a guinea-pig rabbit's eyes - the head
in a screw, distend the eyewalls with metal clamps -

and measure past the redswell and the pain the scorching of the
cornea:
rabbits eyes do not have tear ducts.
In a manner of speaking this is what cannot be said
because it is too unique to the tongue.

Poor B.B.! That the bouvier is a mongrel

who had to learn more or less the pivot of the spiral!
Now I can hold nothing in front of my eyes
and I dreamt that I sleep in isolation.

68
 Still, there is no labour on the Good Way.
It's here where meditations are stackwritten white on white
and knowledge cannot measure it. Empty, rich of light
like a burnt-out fire: further than all languages -

for this there is no past, no present, no enrolment.

The garden is old is life-cold old therefore the wind
a motherless mumble. Oh
oh that open-breasted crow from here to mussel or woe.3

***- Breyten Breytenbach - a selection from five prison collections, 1975-1983.

Collected in Die ongedanste dans.

3
*This last line is untranslatable: the original ("Aai/aai daai oopborskraai hiervandaan tot in mossel of maai") is wordplay on an
Afrikaans
folk song: "Aai aai die Witborskraai, hy't hoog gevlieg en laag gedraai, hiervandaan na Mosselbaai"["Oh, oh the Whitebreasted crow, he
flew high and turned low, from here to Mussel Bay:].
Breytenbach twists the words around so that it becomes a longing for freedom (such as that of the white-breasted crow), ending with
wordplay on the idea of doom ("maai"; well-known in the colloquial expression: "Jy's in jou maai" = you are doomed. Maai" is probably
69
a euphemism for "moer" as in"moerland" or "moer toe" - colloquialisms for doomed land, or down the drain.)

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