Speaking unintelligently

Intended audiences

We spent the week between Christmas and New Year at Sam’s parents’ house in the country. The town is surrounded by dramatic mountains. The time was not just bookended by two major Western festivities, but was cupped in hands of rock.

It’s a time that feels framed and sane.

One day, my brother-in-law arrived with four little paper bags of seeds. The children gathered round.

He shook out the first bag at the table on the stoep. Wheat. The second: oats. The third: barley. The fourth: canola.

The late afternoon duplicated each seed that had rolled from its heap with a similar-sized shadow. In the golden light, it was hard not feel a rush of what must be an ancient agrarian feeling of abundance.

We all touched the little piles.

Wheat seeds, he told us, would become sticky if you chewed them long enough. ‘Gluten?’ I wanted to know. He nodded.

Take the husk off the oats and roll the rolling pin over them, and you get—ta-da!—rolled oats. We rolled some oats.

Barley is for beer and stews.

A gust came up and swept the the canola seeds—like black hundreds and thousands—off the lazy Susan. Strange to imagine that these dark seeds produce sunny fields of shocking yellow in late winter and early spring. And rapeseed oil, of course—one of the oldest known vegetable oils.

The children tossed the seeds out in the garden for the birds. We all went back to our books and puzzles.

I love it when little moments of wonder are casually tossed into the day like a surprise streamer at a school assembly.

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The vetkoek’s intended audience

PICTURE: Karin Schimke

We went up a very high mountain on a tractor. It was strange to ascend a mountain pulled by a motor and not driven by the complex system of heart-lungs-muscles. We came down for a potjiekos lunch at the farm that belongs to the tractor owner.

A woman put a large enamel dish down on the table heaped with palm-sized, tan-coloured vetkoek. I never got to the potjiekos. I had myself some coffee poured from the blackened coffee pots over the fire and tucked into one, two, and then three, vetkoek.

No butter. No jam. No cheese. No mince.

Nothing must come between a fresh vetkoek—basically an unsweetened, oil-crisped cloud of puff—and its intended audience.

I was that vetkoek’s entire intended audience that day. Other people ate vegetables and meat like grown-ups. I revelled in vetkoek as god intended it in her detailed plans.

The machine that pressed the oil from the seed, the flame that heated the pan, the hand that held the spoon that dropped the dough into the oil—each flitted through my vetkoek daze for a split second of gratitude that was both fuzzy and very specific.

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Unintelligent about poetry

Lisa-from-London is staying with us.

Lisa says, ‘Whenever I sit over there,’ she points to the corner of our stoep, ‘I think of this poem.’

The stoep has Devil’s Peak behind it and it looks out over the city towards the harbour and across the bay to Robben Island and Melkbosstrand.

Nightsong: City 
By Dennis Brutus

Sleep well, my love, sleep well:
the harbour lights glaze over restless docks,
police cars cockroach through the tunnel streets;

from the shanties creaking iron-sheets
violence like a bug-infested rag is tossed
and fear is imminent as sound in the wind-swung bell;

the long day’s anger pants from sand and rocks;
but for this breathing night at last;
my land, my love, sleep well.

I didn’t know Lisa liked poetry.

‘I do,’ she says, ‘but I can’t talk intelligently about poetry.’

I can’t either.

We exchanged more poems. Jules chimed in too.

For about fifteen minutes we spoke unintelligently about poems we’ve all recently read that moved us.

It seems to me that’s the best way to speak about poems.

Lots of love,

K.