Ancestral Ground Poem by Charl-Pierre Naudé

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.
The sky grows dark; silver and crimson -
and the crashing sounds begin. A tall tree
might catch fire. I was with my Berlin friend,
we were lovers at the time and far from
our little house when the storm started to gather.
She was homesick for her city, with its history of ashes …
Walking, we could feel the static loading
in our hair and in our clothes, the granite
blocks stacking up, in a world invisible.
The track wound slowly to an open plateau,
a high ground
where the angry heavens would slaughter all movement.
A rumour, of an old leopard that roams ...
Our hearts were pounding, but too late to turn back.
Not so long ago there was a halfway shack.
Pods rattled; a tinny sound, of charms in the trees.
Past a little skull that grinned on a stick.
You know about the curse, I said alarmed, in a joke.
She stopped dead: "We must go back!" and stretched out an arm -
the small hairs erect, roots pulling;
tugged at me, and started to run, a leggy blonde girl,
an exotic ostrich across ancestral ground
of a vanquished African tribe burnt field of black stubble
blood ground her dress flying up like the petals of a mad flower,
flashing the chalice. Me after. Drenched.
Getting home,

eventually. Our candles were still burning.
But the place was a shambles: the tablecloth dragged,
glasses knocked over, plates everywhere.
A feral smell hung in the air. A wind, further in.
"Close everything!" I shouted. "Quick!" she matched.
We fastened the shutters, clunked on the door latches.
The clouds burst their seams. Hail and wind. Lashing
thunder. Safe now ... Or not? We stood there dripping
with broad smiles like two river boats being launched.
Witchcraft ... you run towards it, when you flee ...
And thinking back, the shelter did not deliver us - we were
still on ancestors' ground, exposed to its caprice.
Any two lovers naked are on ancestral ground.
The scavenger … was us, the human being, asking to be cared for.
And the lightning?
The flaring bolts of the afternoon -
that happened between us on arriving home
on the plateau of the heart, where no one can hide?
That was just mercy. Simple mercy.

Translated by Charl-Pierre Naudé