Robert Hodgins British/South African, 1920-2010

Based on the 1989 poem 'These Sundays' by South African poet Robert Berold.

"These Sundays used to stir in me 

romantic loneliness. Memories of old loves

released into the blood. Even the closed doors

of this small town were flaps of skin to hide a wound.

There's nothing of that fascination anymore, and what goes on

behind those doors seems so predictable today.

Sunset stretches rusted clouds across a dry blue sky.

Along the roofs the pigeons chase each other, heavily.

Did you also use to hope that people would be different?

Look at this Sunday's greasy video shops, cars parked all around

the church, Rapport, the Sunday Times, defrosted steak,

this is the culture I was born into.

White people: their shy airport smiles,

their helpless wonder at their sexual fantasies,

their children restless, too obedient.

The darkness transmits directly into violence,

no gearing up or down through metaphors of hell.

I know that fear is at the root of it

but how it penetrates into the lamplight

of our solemn arguments, I do not know.

Once I descended, in a dream, a tower in the ill-named

town of Germiston, and on each stair the bodies of dogs

lay half-alive, no bigger than a finger.

The stairs were carpeted with them and on the ground

dogs and crabs and ticks entwined in clustered writhing balls.

I'd like to think that that was hell, but it's no different here.

Except you wouldn't notice it as sunset sweeps the streets

with its withdrawing light. This is election year.

The faces of the candidates stare out on the voteless.

What makes fifty year old men acquire such twisted faces?

Evening, and the news has settled in the stomach

with the dinner. Down the road, under the streetlights,

people stare around the Super Snacks cafe.

They're on their way to somewhere else, a township

or a farmhouse. All they want from this town

is petrol and hot pies. The TV shows a cold front

approaching from the southwest. Geography, we're good at that,

we all know where the food for next week's breakfast grows,

but nothing of the people who must harvest it, transport it here.

The light drains from the sky, leaving the Southern Cross,

its image welded to a fund to comfort lonely soldiers.

What happened to the flickering eternity of the stars?

To get that back we'll have to work so hard

that even violence will be worn out, defeated."

Oliphant, A.W. (ed). (1988). Staffrider: Vol. 7, No. 2, p.40.