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MZIKAYISE MAHOLA
The Idea
In the beginning was an idea
It entered a man
Soon grew a root
That began to trouble
Making him restless and rootless.
He began visiting friends
To seek their counsel
Unable to be calmed,
Many became perturbed
And acted strangely.
There were men in the country
Whose peace was disturbed when they heard.
They knew
what an idea can do
If it invades the mind.
They began to reason with him
To fight against the thing
Before it got out of hand,
They offered him riches and kingdoms.
When all failed
They removed him
Took him away from the people
Tortured and killed his colleagues.
The idea remained.
INGRID DE KOK
Night Space
The woman takes up all the space.
She spreads her legs
across the bed
as if she owns the place.
The man on the edge
of the occupied bed
can’t decide if he wants
her sleeping perfume
or the neat-sheeted tomb
of a bed in a room
shuttered, uncluttered,
monadic, immune,
where all’s effaced:
the woman’s legs,
her careless spread,
her loose-limbed night embrace.
TATAMKULU AFRIKA
Night-Light
I lie on my back, flat,
legs outstretched, stare
up at the ceiling’s boards.
More grey than white,
they expand contract,
expand, tricked
by subliminal lights
into a hovering, winged thing.
I turn on my right side, stare
at the windowless, near wall,
draw up in the foetal position,
listening to a silence fall.
Soft steps brush past
so close I hear the shoes roll
a roundness in the lane.
Cat’s paws whisper on my roof,
sink into silence at its end:
waste-pipes, crawling up the backs
of nearby tenements,
rattle and are still:
the cat’s scream quavers suddenly, slips
through the shattering, thin air:
a dog, howling in the distance, yields
to a last car’s dwindling hum.
The silence, then, is silence of
the quivering, tensed pretty,
but sleep will come if I lie long
enough quite still.
Perhaps, then, the bed’s rough weave
beneath my sleeping cheek will turn
to soft, red sad, and a fire burn,
as it burned long years before,
besides me in that wild place
where a moon forever rose,
or hung,
motionless, in a hushed sky,
and I had not yet lost the way.
so close I hear the shoes roll
a roundness in the lane.
Cat’s paws whisper on my roof,
sink into silence at its end:
waste-pipes, crawling up the backs
of nearby tenements,
rattle and are still:
the cat’s scream quavers suddenly, slips
through the shattering, thin air:
a dog, howling in the distance, yields
to a last car’s dwindling hum.
The silence, then, is silence of
the quivering, tensed pretty,
but sleep will come if I lie long
enough quite still.
Perhaps, then, the bed’s rough weave
beneath my sleeping cheek will turn
to soft, red sad, and a fire burn,
as it burned long years before,
besides me in that wild place
where a moon forever rose,
or hung,
motionless, in a hushed sky,
and I had not yet lost the way.
