MOSQUITO NETS OF NEPTUNE Poem by Charl-Pierre Naudé

A breeze flows across the seaside town
and a crush in the northwest
herds the grazing clouds.

Unobstrusively,
the messages announce themselves,
auguring an imminent erasure.
At first, only sound: distant murmuring wind
and the anxious clangour of birds at a bath,
the clink-clink of metal.
A bicyle bell in a courtyard,
caressed by the breeze,
moaning softly
like a baby's rattle
in a sheltering bosom.

Suddenly
the sun is gone. All colour pales.
The wind flows into a darker mood. Flings
a basket of splodges, stripped from the berry tree,
against the ancient stained wall.

And the old hound goes to ground
meek, muzzle prostrate,
like a mantis.

Then sudden rain,
in flushed-out squalls
flagellating the flesh like burdocks.
And that orchestra is here too, that sleeps in things;
subatomic and encompassing.
Kinetically quickened little Von Karajans
awaken like babushkas
in the miniature spaceships
of the fulminating acorns.
And with a thunderclap
a piano falls from a tree
scattered slatting everywhere.


It is raining. So hard to describe rain.
Because rain is transient? Because it is
transparent? Perhaps both.
But I can try.
The salvaging of memories.
The following stays with me: how I stood on the rim
of a valley that used to be a reservoir,
since run dry.
And, hardly visible, far down below,
is the piled stone of what once was a homestead,
and the clear outline of a perimeter wall.
And stones, mortared into the opposite slope,
say: God bless.

One can try.
Rain shall flap around us
tonight like Neptune's mosquito nets

in the currents of oblivion.
A grand narrative, of people and gods, shall perish
because the tides are ripping it to shreds.
And summer has hardly begun...

In chaos there is creation,
and recreation in luminous chaos.

Rain lashes the ground. Right in front of her,
on the stoep of the old age home,
Aunt Min from the farm
that no longer exists,
who occasionally sees flying saucers in the late afternoon
when time and timelessness drop as one
from the hand of the Lord,

three wash basins painted with ducks
come clanging past, down the street,

lifted from a garden
and chased out mercilessly
by the music of the spheres

Translation:, Dominique Enthoven-Botha