Charl-Pierre Naudé
Nature and the revolution
Nature and the revolution
That week several sightings of flying saucers were reported,
and auroras of the invisible universe.
I was in my car, and passed an unusual religious ritual
while rain poured down on a fractured dusk.
The men wore veils, except the two initiates;
a small choir of women enraptured on the roadside.
I had never seen this sect, a mixture of Africa and the West.
The veiled men urgently egged on the novices, who were sweating and crying,
to walk faster to the altar, and the new life awaiting them.
Blinded by fervour they shuffled like ducks into the veld
and fell to their knees, praying out loud. Two shots rang out.
I’d witnessed a car being hijacked, and summary execution.
How was I to know? There is hardly a road going anywhere
that does not also lead in the opposite direction.
Maybe it’s something to do with perception.
Some believe flying saucers are visions of the future
or of an advanced civilisation that perished in the past.
Take that story of the two brides for instance.
There’s the slow bride, whose single gesture can take three generations.
Her dress doesn’t flutter, its frills
are embossed in the pressed ceiling above me.
And the fast bride, unwrapped on the spot, wet before the ceremony’s over.
She has a long bridal train, white, and humbly calls herself toilet paper.
Maybe things are determined by how we view time.
And if you think I was a bad witness, remember circumcision
or sacrificial virgins. The quick hand and the slow hand, of God.
Yes, I might have been more useful to the enquiry.
Yes I’m glad, still to be among the living.
But idling past in my car in a time of apparitions,
on the right side of the road, on the good side
of the line, they didn’t see me. I was the one
who didn’t exist yet.
