Ballade Of The Headless Man Poem by Gert Strydom

(after A.G. Visser)

On a distant road through some hillocks
a young Boer greets his pretty wife
and the robust man
holds her against him for a moment.

Choir:
In the sky there’s a moon
hanging sickle,
when I pass the bottom of a cliff
where I notice a man on his horse biting at its bridle.

Later when the weather gets cloudy
and bolts of blue lightning fall like shots about me
something happens that can take away a brave man’s courage
before the first drops of rain come down like gunshots.

When the hoofs of a horse thunder past
while a church bell rings of midnight in the distance
and nobody still walks around in the streets,
when the doors of most of the houses are locked,
there’s something unearthly
that stands straight up in the stirrups.

Just a glace when another thunderbolt crashes down
is so frightening that I almost loose my faith
when I look at the horse and its rider
and that thunder crashes sinister
while a headless man leans forward
as he passes at a hell of a speed
while he fires his rifle that his fingers is clinging onto

and at a old dilapidated ruin near to me
there’s a women in white spectre form
whose shrill voice cuts through the night,
screaming at the passing horseman:
“Can nothing stop you? Jan van der Meer? ”

[References: “Die ruiter van Skimmelperdpan” (The horseman of Skimmelperdpan by A.G. Visser and “At a pan at night” by Gert Strydom. This poem is based on a myth of a horseman that had been decapitated by canon fire during the second Anglo-Boer war.]