I’d
thought...
I’d thought it possible I could forget you
and in the mild night sleep alone at ease,
naively I’d not grasped that I would get to
awaken at each stirring of a breeze:
That I would feel your soft hand gently
grazing
my neck as I lay slumbering in the dark –
I’d thought the fire that I felt in me blazing
would cool down like the star-trail’s
silver arc.
Our lives are like a song’s now my belief
in which our parting’s anguished note is plain
and all joy one day flows back into grief
to be engulfed in loneliness again.
what strikes me now, a few years later, is that afrikaans, with is lack of endings on verbs and nouns, is so much more likely, as in english, to end a line on a strong syllable. this has a crucial effect on the FEEL of poetry in afrikaans, as opposed to dutch, poetry.
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