ôse Vader wat inni hemele is
kan my body nou geheilig wôd,
lat my virtue vi annes lat vi’stuk.
lattie justice system soes ’n western film,
geskiet soes in ôs reality.
Gie ôs allie regte
en vergiewe ôs-ôs emancipation
Like a lot of Chatsworth’s service industry workers I ate many of my
meals at Imperial Curry House. The takeaway was popular with us
because it suited our odd working hours. It opened at noon each day of
the week and only closed at two in the morning.
On Saturday afternoon
after the washing has been hung
and our clothes damp-stained
with its constant carrying back and forth
we sit on grandmother’s stoep
the sun warming my scalp
as my cousin cuts neat rows through my hair
with the tail of the comb
she lays a path for the hair food
and gossips about the neighbourhood
Flowers are always welcome at funerals
Yellow dahlias
In the midst of black mourners
White lilies
To adorn the grave
Fists full of earth
Connect to wooden boxes
Encasing swollen bodies
Fat and ripe with decay
At the backyard of my home where the teardrops of sad angels have rusted the wires, I will make
myself a car from old wires and drive it around new brighton. then I will lose the last teardrop that
ever turned me into a sad cloud with grey cheeks, making a sunflower pregnant so that it can weep
seeds for my pigeons.
The tall building in
Johannesburg, Marshalltown smolders.
A potent smell of burned things:
paint, rubber, plastic, fabric, human flesh,
lingers on Albert Street.
Now the onlookers know,
how the burp of death smells like.
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The always competing two horizons delay themselves in a pause
before night’s fall, and the sun’s lazy eye that had reached the edge
eyes the moon’s beguiling eye at this decline between evening and
night, heralding the zen of things.
Aba teetered between sleep and waking. Each time she drifted off, a bark or a croak or the rumble of a car rushing past roused her, so that again, she counted her breath – to not only slow it down, but also to distract herself from her thoughts, which whirled and collided like balls in a lottery machine.
In die begin was die appel ʼn aanbod.
Die Mattby metro is in ʼn mall,
Iso Omena, i.e. The Big Apple.
By Mattby trek die M1-metrokar weg
en ek voel vir my selfoon om te kyk hoe ver…
Their famous guest published an essay in which he described what happened that day. He called it Luncheon at Pretoria. It was jocular; wry. He built up the narrative with his customary care, beginning with a description of the drive from Jo’burg (thus we called it, he wrote) to Pretoria.
the track has changed.
the melancholy of its spine,
the rattle of its dust, the verge
of succulents and scented bush
