Charl-Pierre Naudé
Athena’s breastplate
Athena’s breastplate
My girl is facing her image in the mirrror.
With the faintest trace
of concern the one gazes at the other.
The two of them were born
at the same time
and in the selfsame place.
And since then
these sisters have been reaching out
to the other by hand,
across the unstirable silicon river
which separates them for ever.
They stare one another down.
Each is the other’s play doll
from childhood –
and on the birthday
of every new day
each gets delivered to the other
in an identical carton.
This mirror image of something,
this replica-striving-for-zero-difference,
is what allows for the “natural” to flow
into what is super- or un-
natural, or simply unusual.
Metastasis – otherwise seen
a Siamese twin –
doesn’t differ much
from the second chamber of the House of Representatives;
or the disaffiliated state;
and that burlesque notion
called evil is nothing
but a fairground looking glass
playing grotesque.
Then still you have to arrive
at that point of shrewd doubling-by-default
known as the soul,
comparable to an life-support lung,
or being seated on a tricycle.
Every day my girl gathers these shimmerings
which she sees
as her personal canopy of stars,
in her feminine basket –
her dressing mirror.
Under a summer tree
two boys are collecting berries;
the one arranges his compilation
into a visage, the other’s depiction
resembles the corrals of a sheep farm.
Imagine:
One can pick the selfsame far-off fruit
– tiny oranges by the sea, tiny
oranges in the hinterland –
in the molecule orchards
of either Jesus’s cloak or
the turban of Mohammed.
No joke, one can go out
and do the plucking
for such breathtaking,
widely distinguishable bouquets
recognisable as “words”,
as things
or thought constructs.
Drifting in
on the wind from outside
is a drum solo
that comes to within earshot.
It’s a pointillist draft
on the tympanum,
a delineation that wrings
into something seen, and from there
it becomes a mental conception;
viewed from one angle:
a palace built of knobkerries;
and differently: a heavenly spread
of teeming, hardheaded demigods.
I turn my sights to the nocturnal expanse
and I swing my sickle for a harvest:
stars cascade with a crackle
into my
concave crucible;
like atoms that in their small turn
would whirl together alchemically
in systems.
Then I sweep the blinding specks
into a small heap and whack them
into artifact like an iron monger.
The tinkling sound
of an earthly roof takes shape
from the surrounding chaos
in which time travel and space mechanics
reach equal
to myth and the faiths.
My oneday species and I
remind one another
of the other like swarming mosquitoes.
Abuzz we are beneath
the breastplate of Athena.
She left it here on her rivergrass patch
beneath the trees,
a short while ago
when she went inside for a nap.
And thus we remain
(amid countless tiny bustling facts),
a tribute to a mould
of the breathing deities.
