Bimli

Parakreets!
Dutch history in ruins
sand-ravaged jetties
that’s Bimli.

A board proclaims
Municipal Choultry, 1900
wonder
where they sell sea-food here.

I’ll build that writer’s den
here by the sea
with these ruined bricks
and tame the Parakreets.

I'll walk to the sea,
to look at the horizons
and walking back to my den,
say "Hello" to a thousand dead Dutchmen.

Walvis Bay

One look
at this coast’s
twisted Casuarina and Coconut groves
pebble-strewn beaches
reef-gutted boats
and battered faces
with vacant eyes;
shouts! this is cyclone country.

One struck here
and in the whisk of it's eye
towed anchored ships away
drowned hundreds of fishermen
depositing driftwood from battered boats
(funeral pyres for the living and dead)
left ashore.

Another was forecast
with bigger waves
better copy
gorier footage
more numbers of dead
jetslam, flotsam, for scribes
laden with mineral water (and hip flasks).

The one that was to
did not follow the one that landed,
it hit some other coast
drowning some more fishermen
battering some more boats
on another coast
one unwatched, all alone.

Around Walvis Bay, they are still religious,
temples and priests in high demand;
the other coast,
I, I, I.....don't know;
why that coast?
why not this coast, again?
why any coast, at all
why close thousands of eyes in the blink of one?

Rivers

Childhood

A young river is a bit like you and me,
if our young days we can see;
un-wondering things profound,
gurgling, flowing, skipping – unbound
too impulsive for poetry, too untutored for song
too blithe to know right from wrong.

Youth

The hills are a memory upriver,
as our years - arrows lost from a quiver;
a course, just an easy flow
too fast for rooted things, too slow for those on the go
relatively poetic, very free
like the craggy faced, shaggy haired reflection of me.

Death

Now, its end of the river, a time to drop the load
for us too, it's someday the same road;
ahead is blue that drowns even killer brown
Godspeed to the depths that do drown.

Roadsong

Words from my tongue-tip get blown away
and the wind's with cacophonies rife,
still, this is the way to pray
wherever, whenever, whatever my stages in life.

That the road is endless,
and my body always rings true,
that days be charmed like a cherub's chuckles
and the front wheel leads always to vistas new.

Wherever, whenever, whatever my stages in life.