The Red Wheelbarrow Poetry Prize 2021 Shortlist

Contact Art

Shari Daya

The first two days were bright and then

the fog rolled in across the bay

and there we were: gone, and just

the edge of the lagoon remained

but it stayed warm, so we stayed out,

shadows of ourselves, my littlest one

a watercolour blossom in his

pink and purple swimsuit, dancing

just as if the foghorn was not grieving

all the vessels lost before

today, their slow tilt into waves

then into sand, but also perhaps

some safely landed ships, like one

soaked into rock, red ochre sails,

at Porterville, three days away –

walking – from the sea, but in

the mountains there that galleon,

triple-masted, floats, three hundred

years since a fleeing artist ground

pigment from the earth, painted

what was coming, what was already there:

the strangers, arms akimbo, and what

she did not, could not, paint: invisibly

secreted in the blankets, alien life

snug and ready for their new adventure,

the smallest pioneers, the germs,

time on their side, and riding high

into the hinterland.

Note

150km north-east of Cape Town in the Skurweberg Mountains, near Porterville, there is a representation of a three-masted sailing ship painted in red ochre called the ‘Porterville Galleon’. The detailed depiction of the vessel suggests that the artist was visually familiar with European ships. Museum curators suggest that the ship dates to the mid-seventeenth century, coinciding with the sinking of the Nieuwe Haerlem and the ‘founding’ of Cape Town. (Text adapted from the British Museum website https://africanrockart.britishmuseum.org/thematic/contact-rock-art-south-africa/)This kind of work, depicting indigenous people’s encounters with colonisers, is often referred to as ‘contact art’.

SHARI DAYA is a geographer and poet from Cape Town. Her writing, both academic and imaginative, explores experiences of place, identity, and material cultures. Her poems have been published in New Contrast and the anthology Africa! My Africa! and her research has been published in a range of academic books and journals. Shari is currently undertaking an MA in Creative Writing at the University of Cape Town.

The Red Wheelbarrow Poetry Prize 2021 Joint Third Place

Return to Tsolobeng

Qhali

Two cubs in my hands

one with open eyes - the other asleep.

I’m placing them in my mother’s palms

tougher than mine - to shield them.

I’m going to the mountains for a while

where two old women wait for me

outside a green hut guarded by brown horses

at the top of a hidden mountain

overlooking an old river full of queens and secrets.

The two old women will only watch me as I build

with hands covered in manure to cast walls to find me

and I will sleep only to visit the elders, but I will wake

with the ones that do not speak, to save my children

from a life without rivers, and mountains, and horses,

and quiet, and land, and snow, and a mother.

I will wake each day despite the urge to stay on the other side

to build a home in Tsolobeng,

so I teach my children what is in a name,

so a life of colour is not that of complexion,

so a life of wealth is not that of the tangibles,

so that each click that comes out of my mouth

has a root with a home they can call their own.

I have been missing for a while, long before this trip.

Sometimes a mother needs to return home to be a mother

because sometimes this place can make you forget

how to be a human,

how to feed a child and be nowhere else,

how to look at a child with open eyes,

which turns you took that cut wires in you

because you are on an edge and the mind is screaming

and they are screaming, and the world is screaming

and if you say one more word, or take one more wrong turn,

whatever colourful string is holding your body together with your soul

will unravel.

I am going back to Tsolobeng

back to my ancestors’ land

where truth and sanity

wait in whispers.

QHALI is a South African bilingual writer, poet, and editor. She is a Creative Industries and Socio-Economic Researcher and Developer and anti-GBV activist. Her works have been selected for publication by the New Contrast Literary Journal, The Kalari Review, Agbowo Magazine and Poetic Blues. She completed a bilingual master's degree in Creative Writing from Rhodes University in 2020, which is an exploration of how we express trauma and loss in our mother tongues as a multicultural generation. She holds undergraduate and honours degrees in Public Management, Governance and Economics. She is the editor and founder of the poetry book on gender-based violence, Loss-iLaheko (a national choreopoem), and a new forthcoming journal on loss, Loss-iLahleko, South Africa's first multilingual publications specifically addressing Loss and Gender-Based-Violence in all SA languages. When Qhali is not reading or writing she is eating biltong with her two kids, Kai, Khokho and their puppy, Kiantoto. Instagram: qhali_writes | Website: www.loss-ilahleko.org | Email: qhali@loss-ilahleko.org

The Red Wheelbarrow Poetry Prize 2021 Joint Third Place

organ of remorse

Ian Bell

yesterday I drowned a rat, or rather

failed to rescue it from the rain barrel

when that is the singular thing it needed.

had it been a mouse, say, or a shrew, a vole,

a seriously misdirected mole, any rodent

cousin with anxious paws like a little

brown widow who’d lost her handbag, fine,

then I’d not have hesitated to offer it a twig;

but not a damned big rat, there I draw the line.

in school biology we’d opened one with a

scalpel and I’d looked among the damp

glistening coils for some part of it to blame

for the Great Plagues, the pestering of flesh

from corpses in Wars, the scaly tail looking

like the pickpocket implement of someone

who rigs races, sells stolen cars, takes good

watches off drunks in bars; then puzzled

all night about which part of me harbored

such callousness. Had places been reversed,

my thin-toed feet scrambling useless on a

course of sinking leaves, would any rat have

cared to look in me, for an organ of remorse?

IAN BELL is a Durban born and raised doctor, who retired recently after a 32 year career spent mostly in the practice of Emergency Medicine here and abroad. His memoir entitled Postcards from Accidents & Emergencies is currently in the hands of publishers, who, if they don’t stop dithering about it, may soon find themselves missing vital anatomical parts. He is a musician with the trio Thr3 Point Landing (to be seen on YouTube) who play old Ragtime and Blues material. With Douglas Livingstone as a surrogate Dad and mentor in his youth, he has made attempts at poetry since an early age, but to everyone’s enduring gratitude he has done little about getting this published. This may change.