Two Old Men Smoke Their Pipes Poem by Gert Strydom

The neighbour sits on the porch of his house
puffing away at a pipe
on Rembrandt van Rijn tobacco
and there’s a small cloud around him
in the early twilight
and he is thought struck
probably dreaming of the time
in his great grandfather’s day
when old Uncle Paul Kruger
had been just under God
and lions had roamed
where his house now is standing
and a man could ride off a farm
and apart from the wild animals,
the invading Englishmen
nobody meant any harm.

Right against an old dilapidated building
near a buss stop
an old black man puffs
at a old black wooden pipe
drawing deep on BB-tobacco
with dreams in his old weary eyes
thinking back on the time
that he was herding his father’s cattle,
about the lovely Thandize swimming naked
in the stream
about a time long before that
when the mighty Zulu nation
send the British army reeling at Insandanho
and the Zulu king Shaka
was mightier than a god.