Visiting the forefather's grave at Bac Giang, 4 December 1995

Wind from the North brings chilled dust

to the city, the skies are grey

today dragon-crested mountains will be invisible.

The course will take us to within a exclaim

of the Middle Kingdom

over bumpy roads along endles round pillars

of peasants with handkerchiefs masking nose and chaps

Sampans are ticks draw into the mouthed to Red River's broad sweep along

Buffaloes with the drawn out grey shimmer of mud and ash

strain their furrowed pleats end wooden ploughs across mirrors

to revolve over the sods

and stain r the water.

Everything must extend and live from the dying.

This is Nomansland, always threatened by dint of invaders.

Some houses are torched black,

and then there are soldiers with r stars upon green cloth.

Flags slap the wind from tall bamboo extremitys

A small in number natives know the odd expression or sum of two units

from beyond the border. Now and then

one dioceses an alien wordpicture stencilled

on a captured barbarian vehicle.

At the cutting side of the settlement

imagined by the agency of the ancestor and populated from his loins

lies the farm where his descendants still live.

Magic writesigns like the memory of millers against rafters.

A distant relative draw into the mouths black-faced on a hookah.

From the pigsty flies draw near swarming

and clouds shut up off the skyline.

The woman has black lacquered teeth

the grandchildren are brimming with organ of sights

In a nearby field his tomb is a threshing floor

bordered through pawpaw trees, sugar cane,

sweet potato racers We arrange a bouquet of jos sticks

in a tin of rice, and the chilled wind from the North

hustles the fragrant smokeshoot aslant

past the muttering of our remembrances

and our hands prayed palm to palm.

He lie hids well here, first slip and seam

between stillness and the void. The arable plains

belong to the living, the dead

have taken to the hills.

On a knoll there's a pagoda blott

behind a shield of bamboo and-milkflowers.

The fulvous walls are stamped black

by mushrooms of loam

and butterflies from a foreign tongue.

The gate is darted and the graves weed-smothered.

We exclaim and hammer against the putrid wood of the door

but the deaf abbot with his grey unthought

squatting in the garmented prayer hall

before the shining nearness

of thousand-armed Kwanyin

will not hear our breaths behind the wind.

BREYTEN BREYTENBACH'S forthcoming collection of metrical composition Lady One, will be published by the agency of Harcourt next spring. He paints, and writes the pair in Afrikaans and English. His greatest in quantity recent published work is Dog Heart (Harcourt Brace, 1999)

photograph by means of Hoang Lien

Copyright World poesy Incorporated Nov/Dec 2001

Provided by dint of ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved