The Hunting Party Poem by Gert Strydom

One weekend a hunting party
comes together on Serfaas Lourens’s farm
and they consist out of family, friends
and town folk:
two teachers, the school principal,
a lawyer, a visiting advocate and magistrate.

The group is dressed in hunting clothes
and with four by four pickups they drive
through the open veldt
past the stream with the blue gum trees.

Guinea fowl and pheasants fly up into the air,
the vehicles brake in a cloud of dust
while hunter after hunter jumps down
with shotgun upon shotgun blasting into the air.

The son of Serfaas Lourens
is shooting with a ELG-12 bore
with red LG cartridges, as if
he wants to teach the older men something

but they find only pieces
of his guinea fowl
and with the trip back
Serfaas Lourens reprimands him
all the way to the homestead
to use the right ammunition.