Poetry

Shards

John Eppel

In a low country clear of the hills,

near where the Shashani River spills

in a good season—discovered there,

Early Stone Age tools, hand-axes, rare

now that plunderers, from the Trekker

(known to his foes as Ndaleka),

through the likes of Carl Mauch, Thomas Baines,

to Cecil John Rhodes and other stains

of imperial ink, have come and gone,

some under the ground and some upon.

 

Rare too are the human bits that in

more recent times, still adorned with skin,

in that low country of thorns and spines,

just clear of the hills, long worked-out mines

like Antelope, there discovered,

dropped down abandoned shafts and covered

with leafy branches, clumps of grass, stones—

because the police have moved the bones,

some muscle still attached to a groin,

and a 1980 five cent coin.