Poetry and Sleep
 Poems from South Africa
Published in a South Africa in an anthology 1910
W.C. Scully
’Nkongane
OLD—some eighty, or thereabouts;
Sly as a badger alert for honey;
Honest perhaps—but I have my doubts—
With an eye that snaps at the chink of money;
Poor old barbarian, your Christian veneer
Is thin and cracked and the core inside
Is heathen and natural. Quaint and queer
Is your aspect, and yet, withal, dignified.
When your lips unlock to the taste of rum,
The tongue runs on with its cackle of clicks—
That, like bubbles, break as their consonants come,
For your speech is a brook full of frisky tricks.
You love to recall the days of old—
That are sweet to us all, for the alchemist Time
Strangely touches the basest of metals to gold,
And to-day’s jangled peal wakes to-morrow’s rich
chime.
But not the past in a moony haze,
That shines for us sons of Europe, is yours—
You glow with the ardour of blood-stained days
And deeds long past—you were one of the doers—
Of spears washed red in the blood of foes,
Of villages wrapped in red flame, of fields
Where the vultures gorged, of the deadly close
Of the impi’s horns, and the thundering shields.
Strange old man—like a lonely hawk
In a leafless forest that falls to the axe,
You linger on; and you love to talk,
Yet your tongue full often a listener lacks,
Truth and fiction, like chaff and grain,
You mix together; and often I try
To sift the one from the other, and gain
The fact from its shell of garrulous lie.
You were young when Chaka, the scourge of man,
Swept over the land like the Angel of Death;
You marched in the rear, when the veteran van
Mowed down the armies—reapers of wrath!
You sat on the ground in the crescent, and laid
Your shield down flat when Dingaan spake loud—
His vitals pierced by the murderer’s blade—
To his warriors fierce, in dread anguish bowed.
And now to this: to cringe for a shilling,
To skulk round the mission-house, hungry and lone;
To carry food to the women tilling
The fields of maize! For ever have flown
The days of the spear that the rust has eaten,
The days of the ploughshare suit you not;
Time hath no gift that you life can sweeten,
A living death is your piteous lot.
The Cattle Thief
I RISE from my bed
When the moon is dead, And hidden is every star;
When the white man sleeps,
And the tired hound
No vigil keeps,
But in slumber sound, Follows the chase afar.
I swiftly glide
Down the dark hillside,
And creep to the farmer's kraal,
Where the sleek-limbed kine,
With breath so sweet, That will soon be mine, In my bush retreat,
Wake at my soft, low call.
We quickly pass
O'er the dew-wet grass,
For my whistle they tamely follow; Over hill and dale
We hurry apace,
For the morning pale
Will bring the chase
On our track down the bushy hollow.
No rest we know,
For we hurrying go
To our forest sanctuary,
Through thickets dense
Where the bush-buck lies,
Beneath krantzes whence
The leopard’s eyes
Look down for his morning quarry.
My home is far,
And the morning star
Rose twice on our hither track;
Where the wide Bashee
From Baziya’s side
Rolls toward the sea,
My kinsmen bide,
And they watch for my coming back.
For I wooed a maid,
But her father said,
Ere his daughter I might marry,
Five heifers fair,
And oxen five,
I must homeward bear;
So for love I strive,
For I could no longer tarry.
Of all the maid
That hoe in our glades,
Noniese is the trimmest one;
She’s lithe as a snake,
As a partridge brown;
And I crouch in the brake
Ere the sun goes down,
Till she pass when her work is done.
In three days more,
To her father’s door—
If I ’scape the keen pursuit—
I’ll come with the spoil,
And I’ll tell my dear
Of danger and toil,
And she’ll tremblingly hear,
Whilst her eyes shine comfort mute.
Namaqualand
A LAND of deathful sleep, where fitful dreams
Of hurrying spring scarce wake swift fading flowers;
A land of fleckless sky, and sheer-shed beams
Of sun and stars through day's and dark's slow hours,
A land where sand has choked once fluent streams—
Where 'grassless plains lie girt by granite towers
That fright the swift and heaven-nurtured teams
Of winds that bear afar the sea-gleaned showers,
The wild Atlantic, fretted by the breath
Of fiery gales o'er leagues of desert sped,
Rolls back, and wreaks in surf its thunderous wrath
On rocks that down the wan, "vide shore are spread;
The waves for ever roar a song of death,
The shore they roar to is for ever dead.
The Summer-House
I BUILT my love a resting bower
Within a glade where forest trees
Stretched 0' er the sward their budding boughs,
That chafed and mingled in the breeze.
And wild wood flowers, strange and bright,
Devised in nature's mystic mood,
Around the arbour trellis twined,
And quaintly draped the sombre wood.
Rich butterflies in ceaseless dance
Threaded the blossom-bordered gloom
,And singing bees in summer-time
Rifled each honey-laden bloom.
From here we'd see the timid dawn
Glance shyly from the eastern sky;
Or, in the west, the cloud-built pyre
Flame with the morrow's prophecy.
And oft we'd sit in sultry noons,
When throbbing nature sank to sleep,
And read the lore in love-lit eyes,
Of secrets rare that lovers keep.
Strange living things that underground
In secret places keep their home,
And fangless serpents, void of hurt,
Would to her gentle presence come.
She faded, but I saw it not—
How could I, when the love-plumed wings
That sped the swift hours dimmed my eyes,
And closed my ears to passing things?
I knew her love was fadeless—knew
That mine could die not, nor could deem
That love was life's alone, and life
A dream, and love an inner dream.
She faded, and it seemed her life
Passed to the blossom-burthened sprays;
The orchid seemed instinct with sense, '
The lily tried to breathe and gaze.
She died when summer's failing light
Slid into autumn's golden gloom,
And when my hopes like faded leaves
Sank dead, they laid her in the tomb.
And now, when spring-time wakes the world,
I watch each slowly opening flower
That, from the silence where she dwells,
Comes with fresh tidings to her bower.
Sleep’s Threshold
WHAT gauzy shapes of shadow wind
Across the soul’s husht meadow-plain,
In forms that fade and glow again,
When sleep first dawns upon the mind.
Like light-limbed antelopes, that skim
Across the wide and waste Karoo,
In changing combinations new
Their mingling masses hover dim.
They float and flit in wizard ways,
Above, below, and in, and out,
A reckless-ranging, lissom rout,
That takes no heed of roads nor days.
They are not thralls of space nor time,
These dwellers on the skirts of death;
They tread not earth, they breathe not breath,
Their homes are not of earthly clime.
Their tresses float on airless breeze,
Their raiment hath not woof nor warp,
Their music as a soundless harp
No sense may sooth nor ear appease.
The shadows, they of undreamt dreams,
The wraiths of buried hopes and fears,
The vapour fumed from fallen tears,
The masks of what is not, yet seems.
Like moths and butterflies they rise
From secret cells of waking thought,
And see strange light and come to naught,
And vanish swiftly, dewdrop-wise.
And no man knoweth where they keep
Their revels strange in waking hours;
They fleet like summer-smitten flowers,
When eyelids feel the kiss of sleep.
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