Jacques Coetzee
How is it possible that this world,
so full of joy and sorrow,
of rogues and insufferable hypocrites,
doesn’t contain enough air today
to fill those wrecked lungs of yours;
doesn’t contain the right food
to travel down your throat and stay down?
Rooms would fill with laughter when you entered them:
generous as summer, stern as hell too
when the rage was on you.
One time (it must have been
coming home from a hard day’s work
busking at the Cape Town Waterfront) you scolded
that I shouldn’t write poems about poets,
but only about my own experience,
and that I should acquire more of that
immediately.
Friend, I’m sorry it’s taken
that last hug to prepare me
for writing this. Even though
there’s no way I can get enough air
into these lines for you,
at least I can finally say I got the message;
and that even for a joke as cruel as this
there is rhythm and music. Even for this goodbye
surely, surely there has to be a poem
that’s strong enough.
(published in This Recurrence of Light, Ecca, 2022)
Featured at The Red Wheelbarrow on 4 August 2022 as one of the Ecca poets