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Writer's pictureThe Red Wheelbarrow Poetry

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


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