Norman's Gold

Norman's Gold

Words

are

cups –

you can't make

truth

with them,

only that

which might hold

gold -

just as

you can't make

wine

out of clay,

but only

goblets

to

drink

from.

Cape Rain on the Road

The red and brown summer fields
- dead from the drought they endured -
are dark

with wet -
as if they were blushing with
expectation.

Road vignette

The black trees
scorched last year
have paled into purple -

royaled into colour
burnt orange trunks
are livened

by coiling
ivy
green.

Untroubled - A widow's favourite recipe

The Only Altar - two launch readings coming up

Two significant events next week in the littleness of my days - a launch of The Only Altar in my old haunt, Murdoch Valley, in the very road I once lived for over 19 years; and in Fish Hoek, at Norman's publisher Jim Phelps' house, where Norman and I met for the first time. I could not look at Norman initially for the magnetic pull I felt coming from him, on account of which I imagined he would be huge in size. How surprised I was when he was at eye level to me!

The Fish Hoek launch is private, but there is still space for bums in Murdoch Valley. 

Wish

The shell is not washed smooth -
toothed ridges
still stand -

umber tips
dot an ochre body
I wish

I could put
into
your hand.

Gratitude

I've just written, and published, the words for the Gratitude page on my website ... that virtual house of mine still under construction - arguably the space given to gratitude constitutes the most important room in any building!

Click here to enter this room!

Give your writing the Edge Newsletter No 33 March 2018

By yet another miracle, so it feels, the 33rd edition of Give Your Writing The Edge is in existence. Click here to read it online

This month’s editorial, named after a poem by Emily Dickinson, After Great Pain, reflects on the theme of death and rebirth at a moment in time when important human rituals as well as the seasons ask for it – in the North, as spring hatches; and here from where I write in the South, where autumnal fruitings are planting seeds to incubate the coming winter’s dreamings.

I am sad and proud to introduce two new names to the newsletter – firstly, that of Kris Marais, whose poem, State Property, commemorates an SADF conscript’s trauma during the Apartheid era; and Michael Whiteside, who offers a response from a fellow conscript’s perspective. These traumas lie 30-40 years back in time; the fact that poetry and the powers of the word generally can be galvanised to help re-live to mourn such injuries is one deciding reason why I serve the Muse.

Eva van Belle’s poem paying tribute to a man recently murdered in the mountains that grace her home shows poetry carrying more than just the news.

Her prose description of her solitary hacking battles, included here, was not in fact sent as a submission, but as a point of interest for a one-time hacker on the Table Mountain Chain, namely, myself. I include this enjoyably readable piece for its encouragement to all who are given opportunity to embrace the fact that looking after the earth may be an endless process, but is never futile! (Acknowledgment for this helpful distinction is due to my one-time neighbour, the late John Hale, who with botanist Hugh Taylor founded the voluntary group SAVE – the Swartkop Alien Vegetation Eradicators – on the Cape south peninsula 40 years ago.)

And … there’s an Easter poem written by me in response to a long-eared visitor to my window!

May you enjoy this rich edition. Thanks go to Mari de Beer for giving up her time to proofread.

Thanks as always goes, too, to Leigh Barrett, for hosting the online version of this newsletter.

If you want to subscribe to the newsletter by making a monthly donation of R10, please do so here:

Food of intelligence

Working with
internet technology is
like I imagine our ancestors

must have found tracking
their quarry ... and here, our spoor of
dots and

slowly
turning
spools we

watch
while
waiting

on
the
hunt for

the food
of
intelligence.

Selected poems (July-August 2017)

(This post was first published on the Ecca Poets blog site)

Best drier

The best drier
of tears
is the wind.


Date: 23.7.2017

__________________________________

Still calls

I put your underpants
back in the drawer,
your t-shirt into the cupboard.


A time will come
to lose
those rituals


but for now
the Wood owl
still calls.


Date: 25.7.2017

__________________________________


In each other

At our usual
picnic spot
on the R63


I stop
to note my gladness
at these places


across
the country
we shared.


We were
without wanting
to be


a restless pair
forced to travel
these roads


– never really
at home
except


in
each
other.


Date: 16.8.2017

_______________________________________
Silke Heiss
_______________________________________

Carry on

Numb from news
– hate-speech, violence, lies,
noble essays, reasoned tries
defending values, hoping
to avert bad trouble, blues –

pained by poems
I’ve proofed
– by children and their guides
in townships under siege
by gangsters (“Satan’s servants”) –

I walk The Bluff
knowing, seeing,
but not feeling
the cliffs caressed by mist,
grey old bracken bending,
looking at their young
in bright green hoodies
coming up.

Stop.
Will I ever be
at one
with what I see
again? Grieved I stand
for loss
of me.

The mists heave lightly,
sucked by sun’s eternal thirst,
revealing slopes of trees
that never have been cursed,
the Proteas and Watsonias
hold up and shake
with flirting birds
(whose avian tongues dispel the worst)

and this
they do:
cancel me
to pull me through.

And I continued
walking.
I saw a Longcrested Eagle …
the wind flipped
through his crest
as if it were the Yellow Pages,
and there in silhouette:
he was all focused, black
and grand
and free
to look about him
there
on The Bluff;

and a little mongoose
did its delicate staccato stipple,
frittered over the path
and was gone;

and I knew
I must go on
cancelling my self
– cancel news and lands of pain –
if I want
to carry on.

20th November 2016

 - Silke Heiss

First published on the ECCA poets blog