From: hornpete@uctvax.uct.ac.za (Peter Horn)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.poems
Subject: Joy Howard: Poems
Date: 14 Oct 92 10:01:25 GMT
Article-I.D.: uctvax.1992Oct14.080125.203101
Organization: University of Cape Town

[This apple. . .]

						for Nancy Morejon Hernandes

This apple
that sliced in half
the halves in half again
in half again in half again
has had the core cut out
this apple
you could fit the pieces together
hold it
hardly know the core gone
but it won't hold
it's for eating now
maybe we should have listened
let it fall on its own
to rot and grow again.
We should have picked it,
flung it to the ground
like a gauntlet
guarded over it to grow
but now we're holding it
looking around for the seeds 
before the ground freezes.
This apple, this nation.




Untitled


i.
hover, hover 
over the land
grow thin with the air
let your eyes gasp and 

from there you could see
a koppie or a hill
from there one can see
streams of darker colors
flowing westward or northward


ask me what is different
I could not tell you

the pueblo and the indlu 
different
as a sweat-hut and an open fire circle
but at both there is a burning
has long been similar burning
sparks spitting toward one sky

but when the land was whole
the Cherokee called it Katuah
there is a township
the Ovambu call it Katitura:
from this place we will move no further
these are beginnings of sameness

she says the air on the Cape is strange
you can see it 
it looks like history
yet it is air
the same as in Shawnee land
there are few Shona here,
Shawnee and Shoshone in the invisible air
they are different peoples,
one could spell them the same
write them in the dirt
with the barrel of a gun



ii.
some tastes cannot be expelled:
that of red earth.
tobacco and whisky won't chase it
still it lingers
its blood iron flavor

iii.
doubly cursed 
this aloneness
she demanded it
that the clay, the swamps, the white fields
be theirs alone
that she could walk barefoot
in peace and calico
stand in her frayed sundress
run her fingers through the hip high wheat
or roll her eyes over the swartveld
and feel her womb swell and strain 
in false motion
in a gesture of bounty and absence
there is nothing in it
but the blank grey of the mind,
all that was, was hers, ours,
that has birthed her
that we birth
this sameness all over the world








						Georgia, U.S.A.  1991
						Cape Province, R.S.A. 1992




Border


We came to the border at dawn,
the sun ate the dawn 
in a circle of fire
and we waited.


The border is 
the great leveller
the instant we step to it
we are sameness
and then
the unlevel nature of the earth
relieves itself
in colors, booklets,
stamps and filtered glasses.
The border flattens all
to a thin black line,
a ridge of teeth.

a throat a circle a country
and the border is its teeth


Stand before it encounter
the caustic blue of eyes
the silent raging bureaucrat
the strange tongue that sorts and crushes
the spyglass from the tower
barbed wire and stubbly land
snagged with plastic packets
they blow like blank flags, strange flowers.


The border is the one true cover,
you can know the content there.
It can enfold you like a mother
eject you as a waste
resist you, that flinty lover.


a throat a circle a country
and the border is its teeth


Some deceive it--
snake across the river,
moving with the shadows
with guns or bundles or nothing,
they read the land in the moonlight
they are the blessed of the earth.
Sleepy raw sleepy
streams of people 
stink up the morning chill,
smoke and worry hang about them,
the crusted eyes of children
clutching at hems of their mother.
The barbed wire stares us down,
the asphalt whispers.
It is judgement day.
You may enter.
Your may not.
You come anyway
in a blaze of demand, dim glory.


a throat a circle a country
and the border is its teeth



The nightgaurd closes the border.
The fired horizon flattens--
the dark means in which we live and tire of waiting.





-- 
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Posted by Peter Horn 
German Department, UCT 
43 Trevor Road, Lansdowne 7764, Cape, Republic of  South Africa . 
Phone Home ZA-(021)696-1983		e-Mail: HORNPETE@UCTVAX.UCT.AC.ZA 
      Work ZA-(021)650-2936		Fax ZA-(021) 650-3726 
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