Gert Strydom Poems

(after José Maria de Heredia and Douglas Livingstone)

On the terrace at the palace from up high
they both saw Egypt sleep under a humid hot sky,
...

The flaming sun hang over the lake like an orange balloon,
in the twilight the picture was too perfect for a cartoon.

Slowly almost regal the stork did arrive from the west
...

When the buildings
of Johannesburg's metropolis
do disappear in the distance
while the Boeing is catching speed,
...

High up in the Sugar-bush hillocks on a knoll
the alfalfa field lays picture beautiful under me
when a striped cobra does lie upside down next to my boot
and I do trample the head of it before it can get life.
...

(in answer to Douglas Livingstone)

Somewhere I have seen her with slender arms
that is easy to embrace with,
...

(after W.B. Yeats)

I will take my things and go,
go to the wild coast
...

(after Ted Hughes)

In love they were the two of them
while it felt as if the past had formed them for each other,
...

As a boy I had startled some black men
where they were hunting duiker antelope illegally.
One had a tjotsji-knife that he threw at me
but luckily he did miss and it went into the bark of a tree,
...

On patrol I saw a leopard melting into a tree
and almost becoming invisible in the shadow of it.
One moment it was gazing silently at the group of us,
the very next the rasping purr did stop,
...

Having eaten as much as they can
the male and two female lions
doze off in the afternoon heat
while the knee high yellow winter grass do rustle
...