A Crack In The Plaster Poem by Charl-Pierre Naudé

- Midlands, of Natal, or elsewhere for that matter


Ruminating on God
one perhaps should forget
the soaring dome of truth
or the all-embracing enclosure.

Better to seek
the blinking eye
of the fine fissure
in a rockface or deep in the mind,
emanating a novel light.

Lights
singular and momentary, vanishing on water,

or a nerve hair in the inner ear,
one of many
still barely alive within a corpse,

perhaps contains particular sorts of eternity,
bigger than the universe
and more distinctly sacred
and existentially entangled
than the globe,

for within its own mathematics
each flicker of a world has its great cathedrals.

Every whirlwind carries its leaves
like the carpets of an ancient culture.

The singing shutter opening on impervious theses
is the recently paled past-tense choice.

To choose (for example)
for the sake of reflection
being surrounded by less:
It's your birthday, and your gift is
one thing fewer, being the sum total
of one thing more.
You long for autumn
when blossoms shoot from the bud;
you look forward to no-one visiting
so that days that were unforgettable
can remain unimportant.
To not get ahead,
for the love thereof!

A little door concealed
behind the yet-unpainted painting
opens up on a stairwell
ascending to a splendid parlour where less becomes nothing
you only have to find it -
for you to be chosen
to throw open the frames at a sudden slanted angle
onto the variegated mist
molecules
(gas spacecraft)
so that protons and electrons can swarm in and plunge
and dash up like bats, like mad badminton balls
shook up out of the breathing, billowing, flea-spotted netfull
of stars outside your window.
That is but one
of many universes from the endless inner
and outer eddying patterns

on God's sleeve; no, a very small sleeve-god himself,
coming from the fluttering clusters of peacock eyes
in wandering Paisley
and swirling cloudscapes

in the domain of the unthought.

I do not remember anymore
how I slipped through the chink,
through a crack in the plaster,
or had seen a world through smoke, in which everything floated
seismically, as before we thought it into form -

mankind being so squirmingly small,
his portrayals
on a palm-sized fragment of infinity;
on mirrored glass
he skates through space.

I walked through a forest of snow-white birches
timelessly petrified in a dead winter;
and the only monolith
not bigger than the rest,
and thus the greatest,
was named Ungod;

all four seasons were present in concert:
naked emperor peels constantly
replaced in the name of the hesitant light
stretching across an entire dead earth

while the shibboleth - absolutely the only one
(which never degenerates into sprouts)
capable of allowing a spirit into the hereafter -
was Caribou!

A haze of gnats dance in the summer dusk on a verandah,
a spotted spray
crocheting into form;

hangs over the reed stool
like an old man getting up,

and there it "strolls" across the cool paving
like a young mother calming her baby.
It whirls in the gestalt of Ovid,

and flows into a tree, a bird,
or a godhead with a message.

The wall with its troweled riverstone
meanders past a reed bush, like a spotted leopard.

God, man, thing:
clouds moving at different speeds.

Translation: Dominique Enthoven-Botha