Stoepkoffie at the Groothuis: Maeder Osler and Jasper Cook landed on poetry:
MO: I have so many fine memories of your boet Allen. Including his trips to Colesberg in the law clinic days. He, Jasper and Colleen brought Hanover alive to me forever. Did he ever write a poem?
JC: He did, but only one. He wrote in a letter “I only ever tried to write one poem, and that one was it”.
MO: Was the poem struggle related?
JC: It came from nostalgia, or from exile-sickness, if you will. Of our three Karoo stomping ground dorps - Richmond, Hanover and Colesberg - only Colesberg has a railway station, so only Colesberg saw the class 15F steam locomotive (the most numerous in the SAR - 255 were built). But there was a liberation back-story: oil cost a fortune in foreign exchange, especially at apartheid sanctions prices, and SA had 200 years of coal deposits. Despite steam’s inefficiency of 6% at best, there was talk of retaining steam, using coal to save on foreign exchange. It never happened:
From Bloemfontein at midnight
through flotsam-flung funereal gums
for the last time I depart.
The Orange River is riveted with stars; leaping girders zigzag
a dance of death over the moon.
At Norval's Pont I waken enormous ghosts of pain.
I stop at Dwaal and the universe stops with me;
in the dark soul of the night
you can hear the wind's mind wandering
at Dwaal.
I have a duty; I must witness a terrifying encounter;
I must be at a certain appointed place,
at a certain appointed time,
when the Karoo
beauty for beauty
outmatches the dawn.
On the end of the station platform at Rosmead
sits a blind black man with a guitar,
"Miesies got a baby,
Baby's name is Abie,
Abie, da baby,
Abie, da baby boy.”<
the voice quavers with the horizon
above the muffled laughter as apple cores and peach pips
are thrown into his hat
or at him.
With set jaw the silence
takes their names.
Delicate titillation of rubber, an Alfa-Romeo on the N7.
Handsome TJ off to see a bored suburban debutante in PE.
It quickly passes me;
lounge-lizard beating Hercules
at Rummy.
I feed on flames and the aching arms and sweat of men
I hump the agony of steel.
My huge flat ears and gait
short from the knees down
are like those of the African elephant
untameable.
Ah, but never more will my proud searchlight rear at the stars
before dipping down that slow slope to Hanover Road.
Quietly I would go: quieter than the hiss of the lamp over
the milkcans, and the softly sobbing child.
Gently: gentler than the stationmaster's voice: "Toemaar,
boetie,
Toemaar, ouboet.”
And then I would join that heart with the drumboogie of
mine
and my wild wail in the night.
How now will children sleep again
on the line from Hanover Road?
The lullaby of the 15F in the Free State night, the mad dash through Hamilton & Kerralaw:
Brother Allen in this poem, quoted a song of a minstrel on the platform of Marseilles (not Rosmead), an Orange Free State station on the Bethlehem - Bloemfontein line. We wish we knew whose song it was. Both my sister Irene and I can still sing it, just as we heard it, from that station platform entertainer, seventy-five years ago:
Hear the Abie tune:
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