Tannie, she speaks
Of eating flamingos
And skilpad
And the fisherman who cleaned
The brak spring by the bay
A line of men
Passing
The buckets of muddy water.
Of getting lost
In the veld, surviving
On veldkos
All day
Of all the people dead
And all her
Cousins and brothers
Twenty-three of them
That live in the
Dust Mountain fountain
Stofsbergfontein
Of the burn when she was five
Boiling water from the pot
An accident while cooking
And the one place where the doctor coming from the town
Could cross the lagoon in a boat with a sail
Of the oysters and everything
That is now long gone.
Of the snakes that have come
Cobra, pofadder and boomslang
Since the Parks board
Have been here these
Twenty years
With their many rules
Of how first the rich came
Then the thieves
At night
No one knows from where
To take away from the rich
We say goodbye
Her bright eyes
Fading
Alone here
In the shadow of the past