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Poetry

	Gert Strydom
	PROFILE About me Friends (13) Poetry (1888) Prose (37) Photography (5)

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Gert Strydom, 24 april 2012

While loving you (cavatina sequence)

While loving you I entered into
a world unknown
where the boundaries are ever changing,
where the things shown
carries hidden messages of you and me,
where we both own
a kind of beauty, finding pain and bliss,
the deepest kind of passion in each kiss.

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Gert Strydom, 20 april 2012

Deathbed

How surly it is where you still laugh,
when death waits as the ripe coming from life
that hurts, when the sun breaks on the last day,
when in vain you yearn; you grab on sheets, blankets
when cancer keeps growing,
when you bleed internally, while it’s raining outside,
when nothing can stop the attack, can cut it away,
tears are flowing; here no thunderbolt will fall,
still you want to find the smell that sparks,
the spark that smells just like gunpowder,
it pains in your intestines but in this winter
you do not understand anything;
your throat burns, you want to hibernate;
you want to wander along, you are used up,
you dive into darkness reaching out further.

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Gert Strydom, 20 april 2012

Report from a commander of a Ratel armoured car (cavatina)

(after Randall Jarrell)

From my mere childhood I was called-up
to the army,
found myself in walls of armoured steel;
the enemy
roared in with Russian battle tanks,
never free
from projectiles that were exploding,
life was a very rude awakening.

[Reference: “The death of the Ball Turret Gunner” by Randall Jarrell.]

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Gert Strydom, 20 april 2012

I did not seek death but she came along (cavatina sequence)

(after Emily Dickinson)

I did not seek death but she came along,
was visiting
in passing looked at me wearily;
I was shooting,
she was a entrancing, lewd, lascivious
kind of being;
who really did love destruction and war,
she promised to visit me once more.

She said that all of her kisses and bliss
would transport me
into a unknown distant restful place,
eternity
was one of her many vague promises,
from her grasp free
grenades, rockets, shells detonated
while still in vain, with longing, she waited.

[“Because I Could Not Stop for Death” by Emily Dickinson.]

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Gert Strydom, 18 april 2012

Thomas

Thomas knocked the secret code on the door
and immediately it swung open,
all of his friends were talking simultaneously.
“Thomas! Thomas, Mary spoke the truth,
He lives.” But Thomas did not believe them.

“Unless I see the marks in His hands
and stick my fingers in his wounds,
I will not believe that He is living.”
Only a week later while the group was gathered

Jesus appeared among them and said:
“Peace to you,” turning to Thomas
He said to him: “Take your fingers
and investigate my hands. Push
your hand into my side.”

Thomas exclaimed: “My Master and my God!”
“You believe what your eyes have seen,
but blessed are those who believe
and hath not seen.”

Thomas did never doubt Jesus again
and while visiting Calamina in India
Thomas destroyed an image of the sun god
that the people their were worshiping.

The priests caused their king to arrest him
and Thomas was sentenced
to be burned with red hot metal plates
and then to be cast

into a burning oven
but to their astonishment the fire
did not harm him and he was still
alive and well inside the oven

and in great anger the priests
of the sun god grabbed spears,
throwing them into Thomas
until they killed him.

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Gert Strydom, 18 april 2012

On Luca Signorelli‘s “End of the World” and “the Last Judgement”

(after Eugene Lee-hamilton)

I

Under that sombre waning sun that shone overhead
I saw a strange kind of sight
that to mere man gives fright,
there was stirring the bleached bones of the dead

and chilling I had a feeling of utter dread
where I looked at a plane filled with strange light,
that had shattered darkness, had made day from night
while strange, flesh came to bones somewhere ahead,

while powerful an angel’s trumpet blared in the sky
like thunder roared, made the whole world shake
summoned the almost ceaseless numbers to identity
the awesome power of God was under my eye
while multitudes at its call did wake,
before their Lord quite suddenly forever free.

II

Under mountains in the hellish glare
the evil rulers and wicked men did not repent,
to conspire together they went
while every evil general gathered their,

but in that kind of lurid air
all sanity, everything good was amiss and spent
as if demons from hell to them did descent,
while fear rose with a kind of dark despair

while they who were lost wanted to win at all cost
and to means of war they sought after being transfigured
while in anger they mocked the very host
when in judgement the sound of the voice of God was heard
before they were thrown in fires of hell or into utter frost
when they were no more, as love is heaven’s final word.

[Reference: “On Two of Signorelli’s Frescoes” by Eugene Lee-hamilton.]

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Gert Strydom, 18 april 2012

It’s as if this season is ever changing

It’s as if this season is ever changing
between winter and spring
and there are some secrets in your eyes
as if something is lurking, maybe a big surprise
and I wonder if something will rearrange
the way life is, to something strange?

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Gert Strydom, 18 april 2012

We stand on a rock

We stand on a rock at the sea’s edge
and the surf rushes in with spray,
while we have a certain knowledge
about our love on this brilliant day

and such perfection I have never seen
in any other day that had been
while there’s sheer loveliness in your smile
and the sea stretches out to a distant isle.

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Gert Strydom, 18 april 2012

There is something different to the world tonight (rondine)

There is something different to the world tonight,
something that changes mere existing,
that with its essence reaches out to everything,
that brings joy that happens out of sight;
I see some stars dazed others shining bright,
hear bats, some owls that are fluttering.
There is something different,

and life feels great everything is alright
I wonder what strange thing is happening,
but then your presence gives me the feeling,
brings to my life some bliss and delight,
there is something different…

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Gert Strydom, 17 april 2012

Johanna Brandt

To me Johanna Brandt is a prime example
of such a person, who were clinging
to her integrity and bravely lived
to what she thought was right.

She was the daughter
of the well known reformed minister
Nicolaas Jacobus van Warmelo
who played a leading role
during the first Anglo-Boer war

that came to an end
with the Boer victory at Majuba hill.
Johanna had a beautiful
soprano voice and got music instruction

form a Mrs Uggla,
(a Swedish music teacher),
and used to sing the solo parts
at choir performances.

While living on a prime estate called
Harmonie in Pretoria, the family
were friends with President Paul Kruger,
general Piet Joubert and his wife
and dr. W.J. Leyds (the secretary of state).

On Harmonie there was an abundance
of willow trees where it was situated
near to the Apies River
and Zuid-Afrikaansce republic
government buildings.

During the Jameson raid,
Johanna was visiting her uncle
in Florida (near to Johannesburg)
and at the time when this trouble

was at its worst
she by herself rode by horse
all the way back
to her home in Pretoria.

While studying music in Germany in 1897
Johanna fell in love
with the reformed minister Louis Ernest Brandt
whom she met in the Netherlands

who was a rowing champion of Holland
and a well build good looking man,
but Johanna returned to live in Pretoria
and was there
when the British invaded that city
living on the Harmonie estate.

Thousands of British soldiers
marched hungry and tired
into Pretoria, dressed in kaki
and were dirty from the travelling.

The British soldiers came to a halt
in front of the open square
near to the government buildings
and on command sat down on the ground

Some started eating the rations
that they were carrying along,
some immediately started sleeping
and one looked up into the face
of the young girl saying:

“Thank God, the war is over,”
but with a voice full of feeling
Johanna replied:
“Tommy Atkins, the war has only just begun!”

There were some soldiers camping
on the grounds at Harmonie,
Lord Kitchener had his headquarters
right next door

and till the end of the war
she never had a moment of peace
but this did not bother Johanna
as she and her mother

became spies for the Boer leaders
and by love letters to Louis Ernest Brandt
Johanna was sending coded messages
to President Paul Kruger in the Netherlands.

Johanna even smuggled explosives
and explosive fuses
into that part of Pretoria
which was occupied by the British
that was concealed
in a lady’s hat box
and the British officer
did not even realise that the hat case
was quite heavy for such a slender girl.

A message to the paper “Review of Reviews,”
about the inhuman conditions
in the Irene concentration camp
where Johanna was working as a nurse
was smuggled in a cacao tin
all the way to Great Britain.

On her way to be married
in the Netherlands Johanna travelled by ship
and while the British people aboard
were celebrating and partying after their victory
and the peace of Vereeniging

Johanna kept to her cabin,
as she only felt the bitterness and pain
of a nation whose farms, towns
and women and children
were destroyed.

She could not shake off
the wasted children,
in the Irene concentration camp
the cruelty of the British doctors,
the cold bloodedness
of the British soldiers.

She got married to Louis Brandt in Arnhem,
convinced her new husband
to come to South Africa
where her country, and people

after war was living in poverty
and where he was a reformed minister
and eventually for about twenty years
the moderator of the reformed church.

Johanna was diagnosed
with stomach cancer
from the results of X-rays
and in 1917

the doctor wanted to do an operation,
but Johanna decided not to have the operation
and to stick to her principles
of a natural cure by eating grapes,
drinking only water and milk
and trusting in the power of God.

The doctor gave her only weeks to live
but she kept to what she did believe
and was totally cured living
another forty-seven years.

While her husband was moderator
of the Dutch reformed church
Johanna claimed to have been visited
by a angel from God
and by the Lord Jesus Christ himself,
she did believe to have had some visions
about the need of her Afrikaner people

to convert from their sinful ways,
that the second coming of Christ
was drawing closer
and that He had chosen

the Afrikaner people,
and was coming back
to establish his kingdom
right here in South Africa.

She prophesied about a coming
world wide time of great tribulation
and the Dutch reformed faith
ignored what she was saying,

publishers did not want to publish
her book called the millennium,
which she published at her own cost
and she was mocked

by the newspapers,
by the political parties
and her warnings
to the South African tribal people
which she translated
into their indigenous languishes
was totally ignored by them

and although she did not know
visionary Nicolaas Van Rensburg
while they were living
at the same time,
some of her predictions
run hand in hand to his.