Travelling Poem by Gert Strydom

(in answer to Louis Esterhuizen)

This morning my VW Polo drives down the N1,
the road snake-stripe through the High-Veldt,
pass place where I grew up, cornfields and red soil,
with sugar-bushes everywhere in the hillocks,

past farm-roads with tractors ploughing dust in to the air,
past pivot-points that spray water over the seedlings,
past farmers that add calves to the others in the paddocks
wild-plums that is ripe to the slopes of the hillocks.

I think about the huge pot of porridge
on the large charcoal-stove in the kitchen,
how after school we had to chop blocks of firewood,
mother's place with preserved bottled fruit was truly a home.

I see the aloes looking like fire in the kopjes,
khaki-bush weed that now everywhere stand shoulder high,
cattle grazing mixed on all sides of the road,
and natives trying to stop a run-away fire.

[Reference: "Onderweg" (On the way) by Louis Esterhuizen.]