'Shiny' - GHAAP: Sonnets from the Northern Cape

Ghaap
Sonnets from the Northern Cape
by Michael Cope

1 Here they Dig

Here they dig and leave great piles of grit

on the landscape – grey mounds half-mountain high

or little heaps – they dig. The sieve and pit

are their master-metaphor; the gravels lie

piled around. They’ve always dug, they dig

and they will dig, till what they seek is gone.

Then, abandoning the holes they’ve dug

and their attendant heaps, they’ll move along

to seek another poorer hole, to dream

another pile to sift, to tease the ground’s

adamantine loins with some machine,

to take and leave, to leave the pits and mounds,

until the whole plateau’s all hole and heap
and dump and rusted wire and stone and sheep.