Geoffrey Haresnape

 

NOON ON BOYES DRIVE

Here is a call to attentive driving:
veld climbs upward and houses cling below.

False Bay is a great glazed plate
with milkwhite squiggles baked into the rim.

Inside the car it's like a Babylonian furnace--
but I'm not Shadrach, Meshach, nor Abed-nego.

The heat is no respecter of my edges;
its instinct is to flatten anything that stands.

This fynbos is fine insofar as it goes:
it cannot grow enough to cage the lionlike sun.

I can see why the settlers planted oak-trees.
If the Khois found acorns, they would have done the same.

Under a humid weight the beachfront huddles.
I steer down from the pass to a stratum of smog.

 

SOUTHERN SUBURBS CHURCHYARD

Where rectangles of masonry
and flat-tipped iron bars
[like rows of stalagmite candles]
proclaim that a Christian middle class
is bedded down in hope
of rising to a sympathetic Judgement
the rag-tag bergies have come.

Some have wrenched open the gate of Isabella Totnes
['Blessed are they which die in the Lord']
to broadcast their cardboard and broken glass.
Old boots have trodden down her rose-bush
in a precinct of four-letter language
sown with abandon till it sprouted
like corrosive blister-bush.

A promiscuous pallet
of rotting curtains, cast-off shirts,
and bags that once held grass
lies under the roofllike slab which registers
the mortal remains of Henry Rowle, Esq.
There was sex in this bed till some little one said:
`Jou fokken moer! Roll over.'

The antique headstones' sentiments are transcendental:
`They are the living, they alone whom here we call the dead'
and `Underneath are the everlasting arms', etc.
Unaided by the mason's art or alphabetic lead,
the newer narratives are raw and immanent.
The Great Justiciar will find them 'in his face':
kakked on condoms. Gobbed-out blobs.

 

THE CLAN STUART

driven ashore near Simon's Town, 1914

Dad used to scan the waters for this wreck
as our train clattered by:
since childhood I have watched for it on trips
down half a century.

Sometimes it barely shows above the swells
like a sly submarine;
at other times it pushes up in nodes
with mussels packed between.

I have observed more ponderous hulls
that grounded here and there.
Once given to the chop shop of the sea
they've vanished who knows where?

But this long engine block shawled deep in rust
seems set to linger on:
I guess its dim disfigured bolts will last
long after I am gone.

With eyes grown fainter than my father's eyes
that marked it formerly,
I see the waves mount up against its 'no'
to mutability.

 

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