ROCK PAINTING Poem by Marlene van Niekerk

Whoever set you upright here, little quagga foal,
alone on your first legs, a birth moment
no bigger than a hand, wobbly and with lips
parted in fresh bleating, eyeless
in the first light, a mouth tentatively
seeking the udder, whoever posited you here,
Equuleus of the Cederberg, in the first raising
of the rear, in the precarious tensing
of the forequarters, has flung a red balance into the grey
one-way grain of rock, fashioned a gravity
of defencelessness that concatenates us, tourists
of oblivion, in emotion, compassion,
courage, connects us to your first painter
in the unspectacular patriotism of tenderness.
In our navel stirs the same brush, red ochre, eland fat,
in our sight the same dead stars,
we who over the ages emerge from the brown river,
noticing and renaming you, preserve you forever, Celeris,
swiftly vibrating shadow on this liminal rock -
no matter whether you perish, your snout smashed
against the leaden law of the mightier,
or gambol away on lanky legs, lovely, prancing,
in the wine-brown water of time.

(Brandewyn River, March 2012)