INTRODUCTION TO THE PHILOSOPHY OF PHYSICAL SCIENCES

Margaret Clough

The double-collared sun-bird singing happily

on the top branches of my camphor tree

knows nothing of Dark Matter or Dark Energy.

and I, too, cannot understand how it can be

that things so strange and so perverse

can make up more than half the universe.

But I'm thankful for the gifts of hearing and of sight,

although, for all things not atomic, they might

be limited..Yet all life long

these gifts have allowed me to enjoy,

those startling colours,that sweet warbling song.

Featured at the Red Wheelbarrow on 13 January 2022

drought

Robert Berold

the grass turns yellow,

shrivels to powdery

straw, turns black.

the trees die standing up.

moonlight all night.

insects all night.

the heat has cooked us

limbs to brain.

green drought upon us,

the red drought to come.

Featured on 16 December 2021

This is the sea

After a photograph by Victor Dlamini

Rustum Kozain

There is that sea, deep sometimes

as the heart at dusk,

the shine on its face soon to fade.

There is that caravel drifting in

and all it brings: a load of good

and the bad unreckoned by the quartermaster.

The homing birds that come or go.

The sun that’s set,

now only a shade smudged by fog.

From empty rooms, frosting windows,

no one saw

its dying spectacle.

There is something of this sea –

its cold and darkening deep –

in the human heart, in me,

that lies unfathomed,

beyond all sounding,

that does not know its own dark treachery.

from Groundwork (Kwela/Snailpress, 2012)

Featured on 2 December 2021