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Nondwe Mpuma

and we fetched them from the airport and home arrived with nightly prayers and steam pudding

and in the evenings my mother cooked pap and vleis and we sat around the stumpy, glass table and watched Animal Farm on SABC News and we threw stones at Napoleon and I passed my grandfather Eight Days in September and with old eyes he read until he had to walk out for a smoke

and night came

and he called utamncane and checked on the cows, and he checked on the sheep and the chickens and his wild horses, and the church list and the goat that had disappeared for three days

and when the beds began to call, my grandmother began uKristu Mkhululi Wethu and our uneven voices were capable of breaking windows and we knelt in thanks to the Almighty and after the Lord’s prayer was sung, grandmother taught my cousin the words to Nkosi Ndithembe Wena

and after “Amen” we answered the beds’ calls.

Featured on 5 August 2021

Gripscapes

Norman Morrissey

I mostly know a truth

By a sense of something slipping me –

Fin-glint and a cold-muscled

Gripscaped touch –

And I’m left to carefully ponder out

The shape-clues of my fist.

1979-11-17

Featured on 8 July 2021

Scrub Robin

John Eppel

1

I’m not reclining beneath a plum tree

on Hampstead Heath; I’m not about to fade

into oblivion. True, I can’t see

what’s going on about my feet displayed

in the season’s first mud. They say the act

of observation changes whatever

is observed. Does that apply to birdsong?

Can sound be seen? Cool seepage soothes my cracked

heels as I, a Friday’s child, endeavour

to locate it bob, bob, bobbin’ along.

2

Then, it was Mopani scrub, that odour

of turpentine; the obliterating

chorus of cicadas; and always her

smoke-filled hours… lipstick, powdered cheeks… waiting

for the man with gorilla arms, and eyes

like cornflowers. Or singeing the firm-set

small feathers of a plump hen with the flames

from a twisted newspaper. Lullabies

to shoot the moon, to learn the alphabet;

counting – 1,2,3-4-5 - counting games.

3

In the morning, in the evening, rockin’

robin. Wrapping his flask of sweet, milky

tea with my Ouma’s old Lisle stocking,

or part of the same newspaper, which she

used to singe the chicken, and which he reads

after work, on the stoep, from the back page

to the news, glass of Mainstay in his fist.

Ouma, vamping ain’t we got fun, feeds

the cat on cream crackers, recalls her stage

debut in the roaring twenties, much missed.

4

Unlike the scrub robin that tweets the sun

when it rises and when it sets, she trips

to moonlit memories (one, two-three) of fun-

filled years after Delville Wood, while Mom strips

bed linen, and Dad files his fingernails,

and I, red mud squelching between my toes,

examine sickle bush thickets for eggs,

transforming whatever I observe: dales

into dongas, leas into bushveld, prose

into uncertain rhymes, lees into dregs.

5

Counting syllables while Dad remembers

Tobruk… rockin’ robin… El Alamein…

white dust on his boots, hot desert embers

still glowing. Mom, tightly folding the pain

with her arms. Where will the cigarette ash

fall? Where will I find an untidy cup

of grass with protruding stems, neat lining,

and two freckled eggs? Suddenly a flash,

low-flying, skulking, you could say. Look up,

look down – gone. But listen to it pouring

6

forth its soul like moonlight when a fleeting

girl, colleen, lovely woman, took my hand

and placed it on a heart that stopped beating

for me when it stopped for her. Understand

that the act of observation alters

whatever is observed. I thought I saw

its tail, briefly, fanned, but it could have been

the detached wing of a moth, or the burrs

on a bush baby’s rump, or a shrew’s claw,

slightly curved, almost too small to be seen.

7

The mud has dried in scabs upon my feet;

I count the days, I count the minutes too;

I like to fantasize, to guess each sweet,

to wonder how I lost a girl like you;

but where’s the use, this light-forsaken day,

of moaning like the wind that comes between

the song of dawn, the song of dusk… trilling

robin… of saying I loved you? Away!

Don’t go! Away! I can’t know what you mean:

observing eyes above cracked cheeks, spilling;

8

eyes seeping tears for what? For midnight?

I wonder if Ruth heard you in that field,

if she ever discerned the stripes, the white

tips, the rufous rump; and awake, I yield,

asleep, I yield, to whatever avails:

what I hear, what I see, and what I think

I know, is that the song of dusk, and dawn,

In this brown land is not the nightingale’s

but the scrub robin’s, and there is a link

holding what is cheerful and what forlorn.

Featured on 1 July 2021