The raven didn’t hear me coming, so it broke away from the cliff at the last moment, struggled to remain airborne, and then climbed with a clumsy whooshing of wings out of the shadows and above the ridge, where it found the thermal, flexed its wing-fingers, and hung motionless for an age, the sun glinting on its eye and sheening its plumage, until suddenly it was gone, slaloming lazily down the valley.
Jan FE Celliers (1865-1940) was an Afrikaner poet who fought the British and found inspiration in the same magic I saw this afternoon. Here’s a translation of the first verse of Dis al (“That’s all”):
It’s the blue:
It’s the earth,
It’s the light;
And a bird circles high
In solitary flight–
That’s all.
I’d have been happy with that, but Celliers goes on:
Through the ocean’s squalls,
It’s a grave in the grass,
It’s a tear that falls–
That’s all.
I had a very interesting chat on Friday with Nick Lloyd, the man behind Iberia: Nature and Environment. I think we agreed (well I did) that what begins as an attempt to harness nature to human (ethnic/religious/ecological) gibberish inevitably results in an inability to describe actual phenomena adequately, and that’s what I think happens to Celliers in some of his other work, as well as to the multitude of writers who were blinded by post-Enlightenment ideologies of doom and salvation.
(A bird crapped on my head on the way down. Fortunately it wasn’t the raven.)
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