Читать книгу A Hundred Silences - Gabeba Baderoon - Страница 14

11. Landscape is passing into language

Landscape is passing into language

My grandfather was the first

to build his house on this vlei,

the call of frogs measuring the evening.

This was the wild around which

my grandfather made a fence,

my grandmother a garden.

Everything from the kitchen went

into the compost

except lemons and oranges,

the soil already too acid

for roses to grow.

Now the sounds are gone

and the landscape is passing into language.

A cement canal directs the river.

Only the high school carries the name Groenvlei.

Few people remember the sounds of night

as frogs and silence.