Red Door Magazine 23
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BRICK - By Ted Stenson - Calgary, Alberta, Canada<br />
(for Angus)<br />
VETKOEK VOETE - by Harry Owen.<br />
A late summer banquet is spread<br />
and the bats know it. From nowhere<br />
they are here again in their hordes,<br />
filling the warm gloom of our fig tree<br />
with squabbles, squeals, squeaks, and gorging<br />
on the fruit. Then in dawn light<br />
those same vast branches welcome<br />
a sudden applause of whirring<br />
green doves and hosts of quieter<br />
things that scatter figs like shrapnel to the<br />
ground.<br />
Nearby, stirring gently below,<br />
swelling imperceptibly through jade<br />
to ultimate red, the bessies<br />
of cotoneaster prepare<br />
their white-eyed feast, and wait and watch,<br />
while on the stoep a little boy,<br />
indulged, indulging, in a might<br />
of love he’ll measure all his days by,<br />
laughs, clambers, pads on vetkoek voete<br />
deep into the world’s lavish morning.<br />
Originally from Liverpool, Harry Owen moved to South<br />
Africa from UK in 2008, where he had<br />
been appointed the inaugural Poet Laureate for<br />
Cheshire in 2003.<br />
Outspoken in his commitment to the natural world<br />
and a passionate advocate of poetry, he is the<br />
author of eight collections, the three most recent<br />
being Small Stones for Bromley (Lapwing<br />
Publications, Belfast, 2014); The Cull: new and resurrected<br />
poems (The Poets Printery, East<br />
London, 2017); and All Weathers (theInkSword, Grahamstown,<br />
2019).<br />
He has edited three anthologies – I Write Who I Am:<br />
an anthology of Upstart poetry (2011),<br />
featuring the work of nineteen young poets from local<br />
township schools; For Rhino in a<br />
Shrinking World: an international anthology (2013),<br />
supporting efforts to save the gravely<br />
threatened rhino from extinction; and Coming Home:<br />
poems of the Grahamstown diaspora<br />
(2019).<br />
Harry hosts the popular monthly open floor event<br />
called <strong>Red</strong>dits Poetry in Grahamstown, in<br />
South Africa’s Eastern Cape, where he lives.<br />
ISSUE # <strong>23</strong> - LANGUAGE<br />
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