Charl-Pierre Naudé Poems

My girl is facing her image in the mirrror.
With the faintest trace
of concern the one gazes at the other.
...

The man who had seen Livingstone was now virtually blind.
When was it the Englishman trudged into Africa -
the 1850s, 1860s? He and his troupe, their mosquito nets
and their trunks, the great explorer dead
...

Vampires in Malawi, the newspaper reports.
Even the president issues a statement:
"Show me a vampire, and I'll lock him up!"
But who needs proof, if corpses prove everything?
...

That week several sightings of flying saucers were reported,
and auroras of the invisible universe.
I was in my car, and passed an unusual religious ritual
while rain poured down on a fractured dusk.
...

A couple of years back I spent a weekend
on a deserted farm, in northeast Mpumalanga.
The world's highest count of vertical lightning,
they say, occurs in this region.
...

Time
is the name we give
to those who had walked
on wet cement
in the past,
...

The sky abounds with a-priori doves.
Wherever they go,
they've already been.
The day is like a dream
...

During untypical weather on the highveld

A snow flake settled
on my eye lid -
and the glare stares back
...

(or, A Concise History of Colonisation)


Giving a name to something
is to breath life into it.
...

"I know the feeling," my friend chuckled,
going through a divorce.
"But bring those midlife woods
...