Four Flowers
By Izak R. Crafford

 

For, in no particular order: Dean Botha, Hennie Duvenhage and Luka Jansen van Vuuren

 

“So then that’s four flowers,

three for mamma and one for your hair?”:

the father and his daughter walk, their

shadows long as prostrates the day itself before the coming dark – grass fires burning up with the sun’s sullen glow the last, exhausted hours.

 

Drifts of dry leaves fall from naked trees;

the wind drives their relentless flow

along the arrow-straight riverbed which is the road by which I go

through a waste land of dust from which brooding houses heave. I pass a lonely man; he flees.

 

“I want another pink one.”

“Alright, then we must go home.”:

a smoky haze stains the dome

of the sky; there are no flowers in the brown land. “Everything’s done.”

 

Flee home along the riverbed road,

offer fake flowers – ‘they never wilt’

and feed on the screen which your loneliness decrees, which your prison built:

drink from the optic fibre artery Sybil’s blood which shrivels you and leaves you wasted in your lone abode.

 

They’ve slapped flesh onto the metal’ heart

and put it in Sybil’s breast to beat,

to return her youth and her heat,

but the heart is dead and the world is cold, joining us, yet, by thus joining us, keeping us apart.

 

 I haven’t got four flowers to offer you,

fleeing along deserted roads – those who pass one by, look away;

but I offer you my heart and hand, [here as we walk along the wind-blown way],

looking: looking: seeing: loving you.

 

Der Wind weht, die Welt ist kalt,

man denkt vielleicht ‚sie endet bald‘;

I offer you my heart to guard you in the night

and my shoulder to hold you up and my sword for you to fight as fades the light:

 

Sybil lives still and will not die,

though she might, locked down by age, in her bed, raving, lie.