SPILT BEADS

SPILT BEADS

The words spill out of me like tumbled beads.

They won't lie flat like prose

or sit tidily on the page and

observe the margins:

so though I don't know anything

about pentameter or rhyme

they might perhaps be poetry?

Copyright Ruth Hartley

Lusaka long ago.

NOTCHES

NOTCHES

I must make notches in my days

because I cannot bear this slide towards infinity.

I must chip a little wedge from mundane chores,

indent the grass on sunny lawns,

slice a little feeling from a glance,

fold down the corners of a conversation,

and wrap my fingers round a curl of smoke.

.

Copyright Ruth Hartley

Written in Lusaka – I don't know when – there was no notch in that day though less slide.

THE MATERIALISTS

THE MATERIALISTS

O God of Wrath and Love

They have taken away your meaning now!

They have denied me ugliness

so I will never know beauty.

They have denied me sorrow

so I will never know joy.

They would deny me sin too

So I can never be clean and free.

They have said -

'Beware of the humiliation of ecstasy.'

Tolerance will save you from faith

and the eunuch comfort

will keep you from true desire.

Progress will lame you

and fulfilment blind you.

Religion on jet-engined wings

Will fly out of the eyes of your friends crying -

'Have!' 'Get!' 'Hold!'

and save you from life.

Copyright Ruth Hartley 1962 – 64?

Written at Cape Town University.

MOTOR BOAT ON THE ZAMBESI RIVER

MOTOR BOAT ON THE ZAMBESI RIVER

The elements of river and sky are fused,

arc-welded by the sun and burnished by the heat.

No longer are water and air and fire

separate,

but part of a new dimension

recognisable only as colour and sensation.

The boat flies onwards smoothly

with only an occasional slight swaying

like a rocket ship in space.

Its as if

the silvered edge of a mirror

had expanded into a new world

a new dimension

a new element

through which we journey forever

like a fly in amber

a twist of colour in a glass marble

a creature suspended in perspex.

Its as if

a giant inverse steel ball

became our world

and we were held

by magnets at its centre

with around us nothing.

Nothing

but heat from another world

and a light of nameless colour.

Around us float banks of mirages

disembodied, detached, unreachable

land, sand, trees,

reflected reflections both ways up.

In the absence of water and sky

perhaps we travel on our heads

through rivers of aluminium air

and drown in skies of wet platinum

driven on,

not by noise,

but by vibration,

in a silence imposed on men and mirages

by the relentless deadly deaf engine.

Behind us the insubstantial metalled sheen

through which we fly

is continually cut into white rain and solid green water

but even this illusion of tangibility

slips back and dissolves into a glassy nothingness.

Copyright Ruth Hartley 1984?

On the Zambesi River between the Chongwe and Gwabi  confluences at temperatures over 100F in a speedboat after a camping weekend.

AFRICAN JOURNEY

AFRICAN JOURNEY

The road rides

into the throat of the sky

a silvered saliva mirage

moistening its trembling demise.

We travellers never enter

that haven of the end of journeys.

For us the road forever

sloughs its skin,

patched and battered,

scabbed and scarred,

writhing away beneath us

through the parasitic grasses

itching on its broken flanks.

The bundu slides backwards,

but our wheels are motionless

fixed on the immutable way.

The endless road

that welds itself to the horizon,

dissolving a bright hole

at the earth's edge

like the gap that is our future.

Copyright Ruth Hartley 1980s?

Will this only mean something to people who have travelled in Africa?

Or possibly America?

END OF THE DROUGHT

END OF THE DROUGHT

Blessed holy rain,

Grace of God,

falling

straight

cold, hard, grey.

Wholly blessed rain,

thirst-ending

wet-soaking

the hot, dry earth and me.

Rain, holey and blessed.

Rain wholly rain-wet.

I have been thirsty so long

for the sigh of the grasses

returning to greenness

and release from the heat.

Copyright Ruth Hartley 1961

Written when I lived at Wedza and it seems there was always a drought on the farm.

THE BALLAD OF THE UBL CLIBRARY

THE BALLAD OF THE UBL CLIBRARY

I walked past the UBL CLIBRARY

where the pavement is piled up in heaps

to the shop with non-see wood windows

by the SUPA NOVA LEBANESE EATS.

As I strolled past a man selling apples

I saw a gutter where dealers deal dollars

and a man keeps a rainbow in bottles

and a woman without any eyes.

So I Cha-cha-cha'd on to the Gift Box

wrapped and tied up with burglar bars

Where the cinema is doing big business

in ancient and violent dreams.

Then I ran past a man dressed in tatters

who was screaming out words of abuse.

I ran past the kids who run rackets,

guard your car for some glue or a coke.

The roads are called Freedom and Dancing,

The drains smell of death and disease.

There are bricks that are handy for riots

and off duty police who are thieves.

There are barrows of money for burning

and rich guys who'll flog you some dope.

There are Daddies who promise you sugar

but ladies, you'll only get slim.

So 'Zikomo Lusaka' – we're leaving'

We are off to the village again.

Copyright Ruth Hartley 1991

Lusaka in crisis during the MMD riots.

ABRACADABRA

RAIN

ABRACADABRA!

waved the cloud closing our eyes

and like a conjurer’s bouquet

the back of the bakkie

flowered in the rain

into bunches of umbrellas

red, yellow and green.

Copyright Ruth Hartley

Seen in Lusaka one day in a rain shower when at once, a dozen women in the back of a pick-up truck opened their umbrellas.

CAR CRASH AFTER LEAVING JOBURG 1987

CAR CRASH AFTER LEAVING JOBURG AFTER THE RIOTS IN 1987

I am killed I think.

Breath dustily stilled.

Broken stones against my gums,

tongue glued to my lips with powdered earth.

On my head a crusted sightless bruise stares

at the sky with a bloodied eye.

After the shrieking explosion of the crash,

under the gentle evening sky,

it is so quiet and clear

and without meaning – after.

Stars fall in disintegrating arcs

and the soft fruit leaves

the darkening tree and

thuds to the aching ground and rolls down

                                        and rolls down

                                        and rolls down the bank

to stop forever where I lie.

The journey from Joburg was so long.

We left them there to die,

                    old and young,

                    man and boy,

                    girl and woman,

                    in streets of anger,

                    in police cells,

                    riots,

                    and in their homes.

Lives brief as the glimpsed trajectory of a shooting star,

less swift than unseen bullets,

like ripe fruit falling.

It is the season to leave the tree.

It is the time to join the killer night,

to answer the earth,

to stop forever,

to end.

It is the season for a man to have a gun,

for a woman to raise a fist,

to pluck the fruit,

to feed the earth,

to turn out the light,

to kill.

And so the stunned bodies drop,

                                 and drop,

                                 and drop,

their dead eyes open,

their live wounds open,

and dust, dust, dust,

in their closed hands and nostrils.

I am so far removed from home and family

without memory on the strange field

by the broken car

in the ploughed bank.

Help will come for me

       but not for them

             not for them

                  for them.

I am so cold, so cold,

with grieving bruises

and wounds that cry.

At home the people die.

Here it is so quiet and clear

and without meaning – after.

Copyright Ruth Hartley 1987

 

In 1987 we visited Joburg on a business trip. That was the time of riots and necklacing, and police brutality in the townships of the Rand. It was the year that there was a call to unban the ANC. On our drive home to Zambia our car crashed because someone connected to the SA security services had cut the brake line because I believe, of an Anti-Apartheid exhibition I had worked on in Lusaka. I was concussed and thought I was in the middle of a riot back in Joburg. I was in fact in the bush under a Marula tree that dropped ripe fruit on me holding the hand of a Zimbabwean woman from the village who had come to help. It was dark. I blamed myself bitterly for the fact that my husband and son could have been killed because of my politics.

AFRICA 1961

AFRICA IN 1961

I have seen the rocks hard

against the soft sky before

sudden night descended and

filled the dark hollows with

the sound of insect wings.

Acquiescent in the luminous air,

the rocks were waiting.

Hard as the rocks,

against my heart lay fear.

Copyright Ruth Hartley 1962

I wrote this after an evening walking among the granite kopjies on Scorror Estate in Wedza district. It was soon after Smith's illegal Declaration of Unilateral Independence and I was afraid of the conflict that I knew must follow.

DEVIL'S PEAK

DEVIL'S PEAK

Devil's Peak is named after the legend that an old Dutchman challenged the Devil to a contest to see who could smoke his pipe for the longest time. They are both still engaged in this contest and that explains the constant clouds around the peak.

ONE

Quiet on my island-mountain

Alone on Devil's Peak I dream.

Hushed by the sound of pine needles

brushing the wind's back,

soothed of the day's ache

My spine resting on the mountain's bones,

I listen and look while Old Nick himself,

blows smoke in my eyes.

At my feet the subdued city

spreads to the fading hills

a city-sea of sound and people moving

on sand deserted by an ancient ocean.

Once the sea guarded all that land.

Drowned, lost, the regular surges

of the tides, the even breathing

of the water, gave it peace.

In a silence, older and deeper than time

I saw the sighing years recede

and the sea suck out

across the reluctant plain

to beach in the pale and early world

the feeble larva of humanity.

Feeble, spawning, whimpering humanity.

Shell-lacking creatures, translucent, soft,

swelling, spreading, bursting, shouting.

Building encrustations upon the earth.

Homes for humans, schools and jails,

places of achievement, knowledge, power.

Places of words, of sounds, of noise,

but blood seeps from the books and institutions,

for in the fat and comfortable homes

a terrible wrong is reared and nourished.

TWO

Weary I climb up Devil's Peak

in the prosaic noonday sun.

Between the cold Atlantic and the warm Indian sea

the Cape suburbs stretch north to the Drakensberg.

There sit the well-fed houses, smug and squat,

eye-windows glinting under tree-umbrellas,

green garden skirts around their laps

graciously honoured with bouquets of flowers.

But shanties line the back streets

and hovels crowd the gutters.

Beyond the Crossroads in the wasteland

the townships of the Sun and Moon lie

abandoned by the sea and berated by the wind.

Wrinkled tin huts crouch in self-defence,

raising smoke and stench against the blows

of dust, dirt, paper, rags and grime

wielded by the heavy-fisted air.

Sweat and tears ooze from cardboard windows

and trickle down the crippled walls.

Here in the ghetto are the humans not human,

the desires not answered,

the stomachs not filled,

the hearts split with grief.

Here men with skins of khaki drill

and empty minds of cartridge-shell

fence the sky with mad machines

and feed the fires with flesh.

THREE

Alone on Devil's Peak I crouch

clenched against the bitter South-East wind,

escaping from the guilty city

to the place where skollies and lovers

hide from the police.

Beneath my mountain hide-out

the earth is paved with concrete clouds

like rigid ripples in the sand.

The sea has sent its alter-ego

to hide the city from the sky,

to blot out all the present turmoil

and give the Devil back his due.

When will I see the tide hesitate?

When will it end its sinking flight to the earth's edge,

Gather itself, and turning, return?

Let roaring waters drown the plain!

As dry sand greets the sea with singing

The dusty slums will slake their thirst.

The sea will eat the well-fed houses

And destruction screaming, end all wrongs.

But high above the tumult

do I hear somebody crying?

Softly

like the ebbing sea

that delivered up mankind.

Softly

like the one who wept

above Jerusalem

on another mountainside.

Copyright Ruth Hartley 1965?

Written after numerous walks alone up Devil's Peak while at UCT and when living in District Six. This poem has been written and rewritten many times and still does not satisfy me.

SKOLLY BIRDS IN THE SEA CITY

SKOLLY BIRDS IN THE SEA CITY

Skolly birds

and the seagull cries

of small boys selling newspapers

                             on the street

                                     corners

               where the people cross

                      and the cars cross

                  and the sounds cross

           bent by the street corners.

Sounds float up the cliffs of offices

like seagull wings

bent by the corners

and harshly distorted

like seagull cries.

The engines are in endless motion

          like the sea below the cliffs

                        muttering forever

                                       caught

                                       turned

                              concentrated

                   on the street corners

hushed away

               and SUDDENLY ROARING.

Movement and sound eating away

                            at the street corners

           gnawing away at the corners

                                             of my mind.

Seagull thoughts slide stiffly on the wind

                                    round the office

                                                     cliff

                                                     city

                                                  corner

                                                                and out to sea.

Copyright Ruth Hartley 1966

 

 

Written when I worked on the sixth floor of an office block in Cape Town. sSkolly birds are seagulls. Skollies are thieves.

DISTRICT SIX AT MIDNIGHT 1965

DISTRICT SIX AT MIDNIGHT

Under a grey hollow sky

down streets wind-emptied

scoured and abandoned

by a brief sadistic rain,

I hurry.

Alone.

 

 

Between places, yet nowhere,

wet coat clutching at my legs

hot breath clutching at my heart

Head down against the wind.

Late and

alone.

A rustle makes me start.

A sharp scrape stops my breath.

A graceful shape lifts up,

its foot trapped by the grid

in the

gutter.

Gesturing like a beggar,

silently waving for help,

then abruptly blustering forward

threatening and slapping.

I turn

terrified.

Newspaper blowing on down the street

in a slow collapsing dance

suddenly deflated, silent, still.

Shift, twist, corners lift

and wave

goodbye.

 

 

Nothing is quite so meaningless

a windblown mindless mime

an abstract spite danced backwards.

But I am changed by my encounter.

Now I know

Fear.

Copyright Ruth Hartley 1965

Written in District Six, Cape Town before it was declared a white area by the Apartheid government and the Coloured community were moved out. It had a reputation for being a dangerous and violent place at night.

ARUM LILIES

ARUM LILIES

I have been walking through

the thick green grasses above

the sweating vlei looking for dead bodies.

Under some compulsion

I went out among the rich fields

where the song birds spill sweetness

among the rank-scented lilies.

Green stems paling when I uncover the bulb skulls,

moist dark earth flesh peeling from bones.

Drawn by the gleam among the roots,

I expect to see them every moment,

their fascinated eyes smiling at me

above the soft dark earth,

while they crumble and flake

in the spring-fevered breezes.

I don't know why I look for the dead

in the lovely Cape Gardens

but there must be a reason

why the lilies smell so rotten.

Copyright Ruth Hartley 1962 – 1963

I wrote this while at UCT and living in Baxter Hall during my first year in South Africa. Cape Town was very beautiful and it was not long after the Sharpeville Massacre. As a child I had fallen into a vlei of stinking mud when I went to pick lilies.