Читать книгу Synapse - Antjie Krog - Страница 6

‘I want a grave from which to turn away’

the hearse comes slowly through the frostwhite winter veld

inside the pine coffin bobs my father’s sons

and grandsons handkerchiefs around their hands

lift the coffin with ropes and carry it to the grave

that took three days to chisel out of

dolerite an icy south wind cuts

our song: Nearer, nearer

my brothers cry as if torn apart death

suddenly shoves us in the back O Lord thou hast searched me

and known me freshly shorn a sheepskin falls

over the coffin the minister reads

the Old Translation as my mother ordered

lay your hand part of what I am how I belong is sinking

into this merciless stone ground. forever gone

the goshawk’s being the lonely intimate gardener

of my skeleton against the concept ‘Pa’ the verges

of death scrabble his coffin grates past iron slopes

as his life was so his death his bewildered

offspring stand where we feel we don’t belong

sustained by natal ground in which we have bloomed

for generations no one could confirm our place wounded

we remain scheming suffocating with reproach un-

charitably we tread mythological water a silence spreads

over us and the brown willow branches swaying

in the icily shimmering Free State light it’s as if

a sighing thing pours from us from our Afrikaner

conscience our languageness our whiteness

apprehensive bold a resigned dilapidation

inconsolable is our incapacity with heads bowed we

pray while my mother’s dry and determined eyes demand:

‘make sure that you cover him yourselves’ carefully my brothers scatter

a bag of river sand over the coffin I see Hendrik Nakedi in

one of Pa’s old corduroy jackets coming forward

there’s earth in his calloused hand: ‘you’re leaving me Matjama’

he whispers and then groans as if bursting

into the darkness of death: ‘tsamaya hantle Ntate Moholo!’

brothers-in-law sons-in-law grandsons nephews start covering the grave

but it’s hard work and none of them is at home with a spade

my brother raises his head to catch his breath a black

man stretches out his hand it’s Kapi Pa’s tractor driver

my brother looks at him for a few seconds and

hands over the spade my mother’s weeping becomes audible

we wanted to be with him when he was taken from us

deep in the night alone and as always without

disrupting anything light as a prayer whole and humble

as a feather but while he perhaps delicately etched arrives

between ancestors and stardust we hesitate awk-

ward in our concern as ever shy before his

gentleness his palms on our shoulders through the years

he restored us calmly with stories

that he ploughed open family trees that he kept

in order he was our hold-onto man our maker of

peace our go-between our thin-skinned antelope heart

the unnoticed clasp of our family belt

he’s gone and how loosely we’re drifting already whatever

we wanted each sorrowful word

each forgiveness each gesture of love that we wanted

to offer is too late jesus Pa send something anything

that says you do feel it: the adamantly unstaunchable

keelhauling nature of grief