The Johannesburg Review of Books presents previously unpublished poetry by Rustum Kozain.
~~~
Miró Miró
In flight sudden a something
flicker
of wild hare
on a footpath look
a bird
in the head
a gull
circling
the clock tower
our time has come.
Rat in the morning the leaf-strewn gutter
along
the dry drains
the sewerage runs
scurries, scrapes its belly
the dead
sundial
clouds shift no shape but meaning
a sudden flutter look look
a bird
steel eye
the cosmos green and
inside orange
the field out in a dream
of sheep
adequate knives
smell of ink
at dawn
the squeal
a stuck pig drawn
split broke open night
bread and salt
making crumbs
black bird
in the head the mawkish eye.
The ladder you ask look
the ladder
in your heart a hungry landscape
grown from an ecstatic gene
chromosomes
the madness of the age
cross-hatched in ochre
one line from our origin
terrified against the curve of God
now void
death’s dominion
unsayable
the termite eaten
Christ
the sudden, maddened bird
prophet
red eye
half moon in the dusk
darkening
awkward bird
where once
the heart beat sparks from dream
out of mud from brown
the peasant red farmer
hat washed from blue
trodden under from
first become
factory worker
the glories
of someone else’s profit
of the future bright
remaindered.
Now the long declension of the sun
red
harden the time hardens horizon
closing
on the shore waiting
wailing the people in frozen vein
stones of regret in the chest
starved on a beach
albatross by a pile of excrement
weighed down
worn down
condemned
on its bellyful of plastic
pearls of our invention
hope undone
pilgrims
chattering over
paint spots left on the floor
left
outside the noise of industry
trucks cars
a highway laddering through
flicker
the million cameras no more the dream
of ordinary things
a cup of water in a pair of grateful hands
sudden bird
clear-eyed child
it won’t return the love
the land
the orange rotting on the tree
the long-forgotten blue of plenitude.
Previously unpublished, © Rustum Kozain, 2019
- Rustum Kozain is The JRB Poetry Editor. He is the author of This Carting Life (2005) and Groundwork (2012), both of which won the Olive Schreiner Prize, as well as, respectively, the Ingrid Jonker Prize and the Herman Charles Bosman Award. His poetry has been published in translation in French, Indonesian, Italian and Spanish. Follow him on Twitter.
