In Cape Town

 “In poetry I wish you would / Avoid the lilting platitude. . . . You should attempt concrete pression, / Half guessing, half expression.”—Seamus Heaney, “Lines to Myself”

Sors de nos tempêtes, ô sage! . . . Honte au penseur qui se mutile / Et s’en va, chanteur inutile, / Par la porte de la cité!—Victor Hugo, “Fonction du poète” (1840)

[Exit from our tempests, sage,

Avoid the mutilated’s rage;

Shame the useless singer’s pity

Fleeing from the gated city!]

Persisting at this Cape of Storms

Far beyond all hope of norms,

Now a model of Earth’s future

In the cosmos that we nurture.

Hushed reverberations

Sing the earthquake of the nations,

While a huge electronic squall

Overlooks the fate of all

We who imagined that we knew—

And tried so hard to love anew!

Rondebosch, Cape Town, South Africa, April 28, 2026

The Password

Where is the password to unlock a mind

sealed in infancy, deaf, dumb, and blind?

No rod is spared to undo the child;

no note is kept of where its soul is filed.

The only egress opening from within,

its path digresses through a sea of sin.

No pontiff preaches there on what to hope

—in that purview, abandonment is pope.

If password admits, it's biometric,

recognized in your fingerprint or face,

no code to learn, no application's trick,

no need to reconstruct the place—

not so much taught intelligence as luck

that spots a jewel in the ambient muck.

Cape Town, April 2026

Parenthesis

"To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield."

—Tennyson, "Ulysses" (1833)

Have I still got anything in me?

Is there anything left to say?

These are the questions that perplex me

As I slouch in bed today.

All the ads out there distract me,

Feeble content lies in wait.

Few, indeed, the friends who read me,

Dulled the once romantic state.

There is, I fear, no simple answer

Silently in awe to heed.

What I have is that I have to—

If the Other has agreed!

Sedgefield, Western Cape, South Africa, April 18, 2026