from Imprendehora
Do not say “I hear the laughter of birds
above our heads.” Say, it is the laughter
of women who empty their washbasins
on the steps of very high houses
whose walls, they say,
can never be cleaned.
By ARI SITAS
from Around the World in Eighty Days: The India Section
It was important to have a conversation with
Pandit Nehru in Allahabad
After the visitors left the fine house
We sat down for tea
Overlooking the confluence of the sacred rivers
I marveled at the variety of trees
By KELWYN SOLE
Don’t trust any harbour. Already
those reflections that match each boat
turn restless, yearn to fracture:
each wave beyond the quay dishevels.
By KELWYN SOLE
Autumn works away like a carpenter
dismantling the promises of spring—
our shelters brought so slowly down
it’s hard to recollect when each wall
fell, foretell when each corrupt plank
will crumble.
Nirox, near the Cradle of Humankind, Magaliesberg
1. Early
Night’s cold spittle
has tipped tall grasses.
Pools of cool light
bathe our eyes for an hour
as reeds weave baskets
out of morning air.
South Africa, May 2008
Today I do not love my country.
It is venal, it is cruel.
Lies are open sewers in the street.
Threats scarify the walls.
And so the sons and daughters of Mother Earth
descended on our airports.
How pleasing to the soul witnessing
global smiles brightening up our cities.
A boomslang stretches out
to probe a nest. A cloud of birds
surrounds it, frantic.
It slinks across to eat the eggs,
swerves back into the foliage,
cuts the light in two.
thanks, frank o’hara
I am not an engineer. but I studied
to be one. those days, the ’60s, we
went to varsity in shorts and long socks and
threw paper aeroplanes in class. chem.eng.
was a tough course. the theoreticians did well
but the real engineers, the guys who drank beers
and fixed their own cars, failed.
By KELWYN SOL
Liberation in South Africa and the first free elections, in 1994, unleashed a social and cultural energy and sense of possibility. In the two decades since then, there has been an explosion of innovation in South African poetry, with a number of poets experimenting with fresh perspectives and themes. In a society still bearing the effects of deep division—most obviously, but not only, racial—poetry has become one of the cultural media through which individuals from previously antagonistic groups can share and explore their feelings and emotions, thereby, at times, creating bonds of mutual sympathy. At the same time, the social and political foci of pre-liberation poetry have remained but have been transformed and augmented by a number of fresh areas of concern.
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