Kobus Moolman
Day and night, night after night,
deep in his prayer, he deliberated
whether it was possible to draw the dark
without ever looking at it.
He had his head in his hands.
His hands covered his eyes.
His breath caught on words that tasted like ash.
Day and night, night after night,
he dragged his slow feet across
the frozen lake of memory.
It was dark always, there
beneath that bright layer of appearances;
a darkness he trusted,
the way a child trusts his mother
to recognise him in the rush after the bell.
And yet now, oh,
now, after so many mistakes, so many times around
the same stale track of reaction,
he had begun to wonder whether
it could ever be possible to look, only
look into the inside of the darkness
without being turned into it.
Featured at the Red Wheelbarrow on 15 February 2022