The weeping of the penny whistle

The penny whistle begins to weep
in my dreams: when was it I heard it
for the first time, and now I cannot silence it.

It weeps, monotonously, like the water
running over the stones in Jonkershoek Valley.

It weeps like the wind: it weeps in the distance.
I weeps for all whistlers who have died
in the long years of hunger and birdshot.

It weeps in the sand that has been drenched
with the blood of passers-by
when the bombs exploded
in bars and churches.

It weeps in the trees, it weeps with the birds,
it weeps in my dreams climbing the scales
of sorrow and madness.

The desert tastes yellow

The desert tastes yellow on my tongue
and bitter like herbs in a narrow gorge
where water waits under the rocks
for the next rain in five years
and where fish suffocate
which were born in the mountain streams
but the frogs play their unending pan-flutes
as soon as the moon rises over the black mountains.

That then is the night: a dark blue ocean
filled with sounds of shifting sands:
Cricket chirping floats on the air
like a hot breath, a song turned to ashes,
vibrating between the white teeth
of springbok skulls, a sigh of the wind.

Here all the roads lead to nowhere in particular,
they end in a sandy ford of soundless tracks
through the whirlpool of dessicated dreams.

Somewhere under the Southern Cross
you lie on your back and hear
the desert owl hoot its loneliness
across the curve of the canyon.

Afternoon at the pool

The afternoon opens the surface of the pool,
green, stinking, slimy: the gelatinous strings
of frogs' eggs fill the water between the grass.

The carmine bee-eaters streak over the surface
hunting dragon flies and angry cicadas
clash the cymbals of their legs against the rock.

A broad avenue of light runs across the water
towards my waiting eyes: unbearable brilliance
of wavelets circling for ever the fin of a fish.

My brain is a prism which discovers the colours
in the eternal whiteness of the summer sun
and the colourless vibration of photons in the air.