Charl JF Cilliers
Charl JF Cilliers Poems
Nearby you see him in air
cavorting in twistings of light
that part of him that you share
...
No longer is there a train
that goes steaming by
and yet I still see the red coals glowing
against the morning sky.
...
I would turn the prow
to where it found the wind
rushing to fill the sails
with a shudder beneath my feet
...
It’s mid-September in Namaqualand.
After the rains the stones take root
and blossom from the hills down to the streams.
...
A leaf is green and splendid in the spring.
Full of life, its image leaps into our eyes.
Yet pale are all its colours when it’s living
...
Across the lake like a desperate cry
I’d catapult the smoothest stone
that I could find and watch it fly
high into the air to hover there alone.
...
Autumn confirms
the less-than-perfect
as the most endearing,
as chaste reluctance
...
It is autumn and the cold is setting in
and still you must journey on
no longer do waves
...
Here lies a graveyard where statues of steel,
carved in calamity, spiral to the sky,
twisted and torn into being on an impulse,
created in a high moment of destruction,
...
Sky-clad the hungry wolves leap
at shadows in the snow,
shadows by moon and tree
that cold winds blow.
...
Knowing comes with grief
more than hope, belief:
as there are words that come
as if coming home.
...
They moved in on one
youthful springtime afternoon
and settled in the shape
of a honeycomb balloon.
...
I said to myself:
the crucial moments must be where
the line breaks come;
you’ll start moving to my rhythms too,
...
The south-east wind sends scraps
of the world to my door;
distorted lamppost shapes,
ghostly hunched forms, explore
...
looking
you still don’t see
the well’s coldest depths far
beneath the distortions that are
...
being
reduced to bones
clothes torn that once adorned
the lifeless body of silence
...
Charl JF Cilliers Biography
I was born in Cape Town on 25/1/41 but moved away before the age of 18 months. My parents were divorced before I started school and the family moved virtually every year. I matriculated at Clapham High in Pretoria in 1958, qualified as an electronics lecturer at the Post Office Training Centre in Pretoria. Joined Parliament as a translator in 1968 and retired as Editor of Hansard in 1998, moving to the West Coast, where I am devoting myself to my writing.)
The Best Poem Of Charl JF Cilliers
Falcon
Perches momentarily in mid-flight,
wide-winged, on a crag of sunlight.
Catamarans down, soft as a last breath
of wind, and claws the shrill of death.
Charl JF Cilliers Comments
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5/18/2026 4:34:43 AM # 1.0.0
REVIEWS: These poems convince as imaginative truths because of their hard core of compressed fact and feeling. Frequently they are based on precise observation of phenomena. But, though often metaphysical, they are not narrowly inward-looking. Everywhere evident is the writer’s sense of responsibility to words and to men. Obscurity is not courted, though some of the poems are not easy. Nothing is ‘easy’ in the pejorative sense of the word, and, in attempting to give a just account of them, one must try not to falsify the complexity of apparently simple utterances. Prof R Harnett on West-Falling Light En hoe verrassend is dié versameling “vergete verse” nie. ‘n Wye verskeidenheid van emosionele ervarings en versvorme met ‘n deurdagte taal- en prosodiese beheer sal die leser van dié ruim versameling deurgaans opval... daar is geen digterskap aan hierdie leser bekend wat so deurlopend en met soveel variasie met die spanning tussen lig en donker gemoeid bly nie. Dr Lucas Malan on Collected Poems 1960-2008 Die besonderse hantering van die prosodie, verrassende slotte en helder beelde imponeer keer op keer. Kyk hoe knap word rympatrone hanteer…Dis ‘n bundel waarin ‘n mens bewus word van die digter se komplekse verhouding met die digkuns… Prof Joan Hambidge on Collected Poems 1960-2008 It is Mr Cilliers’ second collection and his first for seven years. It brings together more than 50 poems published at different times in local literary journals, all noted for their high standards. And in this volume at least he never betrays those standards. He writes for the most part with a facile, fluid line that reads simply and easily. But do not be lulled by this surface fluency: Whatever depths of thought or flights of fancy inspired his lines, whatever ironies or mysteries are intended by them, these are exposed only when the poems are properly savoured. John Tucker on Has Winter No Wisdom Cilliers’ verse is frequently given to the contemplation of the forces – dynamic and destructive – at work in man and nature. Prof Ridley Beeton in the SABC programme New Voices