Found poem near Fort Hare

Brian Walter

When I once taught poetry

a colleague asked me to work up

an anti-litter poster for her project:

I had more to show, I reflected,

than tell; and so I drifted across the road

to the empty plot of long dry grass

to glean scraps of our humanity

from a mental metre I marked out

and squared amongst the stunted shrubs,

and I collected all the litter there

to pin up, annotate, and hopefully

to engender reflection on what we do.

Mine was so unlike the other posters

that people stopped and pointed,

but I saw that what caught their eyes

amongst chip packets, flat milk cartons

and plastic was the old story, the mystery

of the torn open pink condom sleeve.

(published in This Recurrence of Light, Ecca, 2022)

Featured at The Red Wheelbarrow on 4 August 2022 as one of the Ecca poets

Pirate Love

Steph Saunders

The hatches safely battened down;

in the light of the soot-blackened lamp,

they attended to what passes for foreplay between pirates.

Their black hats with the skull-and-crossbones,

were carefully shelved. The eye patches stayed in place.

They helped one-another unbuckle

their swords and sidearms. She insisted he remove

the cutlass from between his teeth, before he kissed her.

His parrot was jealous, and bit her ear and had to be

un-shouldered, caged and covered.

He slowly unscrewed his hook-hand, so needed help

to remove his wooden leg; something he seldom did,

but she likened it to going to bed in his boots.

At first, she seemed distracted by the tattoo on his chest,

of a ship, in full sail, flying the Jolly Roger, and what

looked like a large barnacle beneath it

but after a few barrels of rum, they were lustfully engaged

in extra-marital combat. Afterwards,

repeating what his parrot had been saying

all along, from under the cover, all he could say was

“Yo ho ho!”

Featured at The Red Wheelbarrow on 2 August 2022

Birthmarks

Bususiwe Mahlangu

My mother's mother has done this suffering for my mother

My mother has done this suffering for me

This is how I inherit a scar

Featured at The Red Wheelbarrow on 28 July 2022