Forsaken Place
(a long goodbye – In memory of all the farm murders)
The kraal stands empty. No cattle click horns in the cold night.
A ploughshare rusts upon the land it once tilled.
The gabled house is roofless, the whitewash scorched ash.
The only sound is of the wind in the blue gums and the tick, tick, ticking of a piece of corrugated iron against a metal trough.
There are weeds in the driveway and on the lands they spread far.
Nothing grows here now except silence and birdsong by day and the call of the jackal by night.
At dawn the vast emptiness is lit, but bare, and little moves.
There is no farm traffic upon the road, no trucks, mulewagons or oxcarts. The windmill vanes are still.
There are insects moving and dust devils and the high silent circling of raptors.
But the land is free of man and his ambitions.
This is a place that had a past and a brief bloody present, but now it awaits the future.
If you are of the tribe that made this land your home, you will hear voices in the silence beyond the wind in the gum trees.
There are orders to the herdsmen, and to workers on the land.
There is the sound of bible reading and party laughter.
Dogs bark and cattle low, there is the complaint of sheep.
And the remembered hum of traffic on the Trans-Karoo highway.
The gravestones on the koppie are in a language that bears dark history.
They lie about like eye charts for the buzzards
On which lizards bask, black exclamation marks.
On the hill’s crest a stone cross lies flat amid the scrub.
Time and distance fill this space, but little else.
Kommentaar
Sheer brilliance !
Sad, evocative, brilliant. We all 'await the future' and hope for a better one...
Thanks so much, Miche.
Very well sketched, leaving the mind to try and think what happened, with many scenarios playing mindgames of why it is all so - empty and lonely, with a history of farm tragedies trying to answer this question.
Thanks, Johan.
Mooi, Julian. Jy slaag goed daarin om hiermee 'n tragiese leemte in ons literatuur aan te spreek. En dit in Engels vanuit Groot Brittanje. Toekomstige Afrikaanse literêre historici sal nog eendag wonder hoekom resente digters en skrywers hierdie onderwerp so afgeskeep het. Bevindinge mag dalk net nie vleiend wees nie. So 100 jaar of wat gelede was die plaas en boer 'n prominente onderwerp in ons letterkunde. Hoe het die wiel nie gedraai die afgelope tyd nie.
Philip, Baie dankie vir die mooi boodskap. Verskoon my as ek Engels gebruik vir die res van my antwoord - na 44 jaar in Engeland is my moedertaal vreeslik veroes!
If you read one of my first books: Boerejood (Jacana SA), you will understand where I am coming from. Although I have been gone from the Cape for more than four decades there remains a 'hole in my soul' as one Stellenbosch academic (Gagiano) descried what ailed me. And he was not far wrong. So I keep a close watch on developments in SA and the farm murders have not passed me by. My Jewish blood revolts at what looks like "ethnic cleansing" to use that vile phrase. I am not unaware that part of this blood-soaked scenario is in part a case of "As you sow, so shall you reap". But it is no less horrible for all that. Thanks again for the kind message.