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Poetry

Please read and enjoy these submissions!

Remember to take note of the code (poe1-poe39) and to vote here for first place, here for second place and here for third place.

poe15: BUSHVELD  EVENING

Departure evening: I drive down to the dam
to imprint in memory
this natural elegance
of Nature’s Reserved Territory.

Iridescent turquoise-winged lilac-breasted roller flashes nestwards
Cormorants sail heavenwards into wind ripples,
 white-breasted fellows hunch down in Old Man Tree.

Weavers twitter from swinging reedbed nests
Hippos sink ponderously
Eleven fluffballs scurry after parents -
family bathing and feeding at water’s edge -
a green-eyed egyptian goose flotilla.

A bird jumps in the dry grass nearby.
Highveld sun disappears behind nearby hills
Goslings waddle out of sight.

Roseate colours suffuse clouds and sky
until starlight commands the night.

No sign of crocodile
Nor resident white-fronted bee-eaters feeding on the wing
Showing off aerial acrobatics.

But plovers are here
chinking
And
we all come to rest
as the sun sets below the horizon
and the silence beds down.

I spend time here
Many hours
Just looking, watching,
Paying attention
So that I may see more,
hear more,
become more an item of this place.
That I may feel more
the wind, the dust, the flies.
That I may come
within the spaciousness
the stillness
of the Earth’s natural life

So that I may become
utterly and completely exonerated
 from
human
and urban
ugliness.

 

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