helen

Sue Woodward

In the evening the women are permitted to stand on the battlements to

watch the culmination of the day’s battle. The sun is setting in a stain of

red. Our men are marching raggedly through the gates of Troy, Hector in

front, then Paris, Glaucus and the others.

The Greeks have retreated to their ships, their wagons loaded with dead

bodies and a scrapheap of shields, helmets and spears. Tomorrow will be

the same. There is a cold wind. The king leaves to greet the returning

soldiers. A brazier is burning, the guards are at ease.

I have an impulse to grab a sword, thrust its metal shaft into the brazier,

hold it until it burns crimson, press it to my cheeks, set my hair to

burning, blister my brows, sear my lips, cauterise my ears. My face

would run like lava, turn a thousand wooden ships to stone.

Featured at The Red Wheelbarrow in-person launch of The Only Magic We Know: Selected Modjaji Poems 2004-2020 on 31 March 2022

Walking the Lioness

Robin Winckel-Mellish

I’m a lioness slouching

down the Hooftstraat

on a diamond-studded leash.

Man-eater, alter ego, alley cat,

I’m spooked by a naked gaze,

those fur-draped shoulder blades.

I’m having a hard time keeping up,

feeling my cat breath taut –

shivering inside my skin

I’ll make the break,

follow a bush-scent back

into wilderness. Loose now

on the run, I’ll sink teeth

into knucklebone, spill

sapphires from my mouth.

Featured at The Red Wheelbarrow in-person launch of The Only Magic We Know: Selected Modjaji Poems 2004-2020 on 31 March 2022

Star walk

Kirstenbosch Botanical Gardens

Megan Hall

I choose a night walk, drag my dad along, my first birthday after her death.

We’re the family we’ve got now, here in the south.

The stars beckon me, as we walk to where kind astronomers

have mounted their telescopes, prepared to share them even with us,

to whom the idea that the sun is a star seems strange and unnatural.

I lie on my back on the grass, and insects walk up the legs of my trousers

and bite me with small jaws. I am surprised they can open them wide enough.

After the scruffy anecdotes of the guide, star talk for real; real stars.

There are Canopus, and double Alpha Centauri like coupled diamond shards.

I have never met these stars before, nor single Beta, red Sirius.

Small but clear, Saturn appears in my telescope’s field,

a perfect luminous sticker for the ceiling.

Then the moon, with its scarred surface like an acned boy, but bright cream.

The stars and planets are bees in the night, each sun humming,

attracting and swarming, hot in the silent fields of sky.

by Megan Hall

⎘

Anniversary

It burst into the wall above our bed –

a rocket, a bullet, a streak of light.

The wall shook and crumbled, falling away.

The roof took off in fright,

flapping wings of mouldy red tiles.

In the middle of the city, our bed:

dogs barking, drunks stumbling home.

This is where the last two years have brought us:

back to a city street

and you,

trying not to hold my hand.

Featured at The Red Wheelbarrow in-person launch of The Only Magic We Know: Selected Modjaji Poems 2004-2020 on 31 March 2022