Some New Poems

The Motorway

On the False Bay end walls hide 
a suburbia of cottages and flats

and a graveyard with small crosses 

and jars of artificial flowers. Funerals

clog the road  on Saturdays, but in the week

it slinks with dogs and tik-heads,

crawls with girls and boys − schooldays 

with satchels, Sundays  to the beach with towels.

Today is Monday so there’s washing in backyards

A pair of boys push Supermarket trolleys,

piled with a harvest of suburban dirt-bins.

Men stand by the roadside on the Southern side.

One holds a paintbrush and a pan, another

stares out dull-eyed, a shovel by his side

still shiny after weeks of waiting.

At a rubbish-strewn alleyway entrance

drugs and gossip are traded in the afternoons

−.a dead body in one of the upstairs flats.

been there for two days, they say.

Yes, this is gangland, isn’t it?

A church, a school, a mosque, a shopping mall, 
the spaces between them strewn with plastic bags,

bent tins and cool-drink bottles.

But among the tenements, succulents are

struggling to survive in a guerrilla garden

and someone has planted lavender bushes

by a blue-washed wall

THE DOG AGILITY  TRIAL

The course flows like a piece of verse.

Spaces between words −

green grass between obstacles.

Numbers show line breaks,

commas and semicolons, pauses

for twists and turns. Some jumps

are words not to be taken straight.

You must go round them and

approach them from a different angle.

A tunnel curve hides meaning for

a moment; then a mid-stanza

see-saw shatters concentration before

a leap in another direction.

A struggle up a frame comes next.

A stop, another leap and then

a smooth run leads towards

a surprise ending.

.
WIND AT NIGHT

Tonight I listen to the wind’s soft groans.

They sound like cattle lowing.

The cows that used to graze here by the vlei

have all been moved to other fields.

But when I lived in George

my neighbour used to keep a dairy herd

and cows grazed in the field behind our house.

One Sunday night my neighbour’s wife called me

to help them pull a calf. Four of us there were

to strain on ropes tied round the legs. 

Little, black hooves came first,

then a brown soft-nosed head.

At last the whole body gurgled and plopped down

onto hard earth, and the calf lay there panting,

waiting to be licked to life.

and as she nudged it, the cow mooed

softly like the moaning wind