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 

I was born in 1963 and grew up in Cape Town and Johannesburg. 

When I was 21 years old, I left South Africa to join a Kibbutz in Israel and, after extensive traveling in Europe and America, I settled on the coast in California. I lived there amongst the redwoods and oaks and above the mighty Pacific for 30 years. During that time, I visited Cape Town often. In 2013 I returned to South Africa to live. For most of my life I have been a visual person, creatively exploring painting, photography and drawing. My writing was always private.

Since my first Life Righting Course in 2022, I have been writing regularly and have taken on the task of refining work and reading it out loud. I am exploring writing both my own stories and those I discover in this richly storied land.