John Eppel Biography

When they cried freedom, when the sweet
mingling of woodsmoke and jasmine
with dust - grass, granite, antelope
...

Romantics like Rousseau talk nonsense
when they insist that we are born free,
though he's right about the chains. See,
you didn't know which side of the fence

you would end up attempting to climb.
You had no say in your spawning,
or the biology of your thing,
or your complexion. Yet time and time

again we are told of a free press,
a free state, free will, freedom of speech,
freedom to write what we like, to preach
what we like, freedom to make a mess.

"It's often safer to be in chains,"
says Franz Kafka, "than to be free."
But safety is not the issue, see -
it's the rains, the coming of the rains.
...

Your brother Khaki Weed has given
you a bad name: Black Jack they call him;
the hiker's curse; as ubiquitous
as the devil, without his charm. Drives
prospectors to blistered socklessness;
invades, like pricking desire, knickers;
clings to the ears of cocker spaniels;
stains trouser bottoms; makes fingers stink;
lodges in the corner's of cow's eyes;
starts skin rashes which sometimes fester
like lilies in old wreaths. You stink too,
Marigold. You give off a pungent,
khaki odour of crushed beetles, soil,
old men, hat linings, ointment and dung.
And yet I love your smell - your odour -
better than a million Krugerrands
carpeted around a city hall;
better than your fancy Latin name
Tagetes; better than your native
Mexico in Aztec times; better
than your cousin, that reliable
annual the Calendula. Yes,
better even than your glorious
crinkly, flaky, golden head-pieces
which adorned my mother's garden like
moultings from the noonday summer sun.

It's really your brother that I love.
Your odour reminds me of Black Jack,
and Black Jack, ou Khaki Bos, reminds
me of Colleen Bawn where we flourished.
I remember one school holiday
when a bunch of us hiked to Jessie
Hotel, drank a Coke at the petrol
pump, and hiked back. Sixteen miles for what?
A Coke and tackies full of black jacks.
I remember going prospecting
with my father, following his wide
back through parched mopani veld, across
vleis where lilies grew, down dry dongas
looking for quartz reefs; occasionally
stopping to drink from my father's World
War Two bottle, and to pluck black jacks
from our stockings. And I remember
a girl with shiny brown hair - the things
we did on the golf course by the glow
of a genial moon.


I believe
the moon still visits there. But Puza
the Simpson's old spaniel is dead now,
and Fred is in Cape Town, and Gillie
is married, and Taz was killed by 'terrs',
and Bob's gone religious, and the old
cow down at the dam is Fray Bentos,
and I am overseas, looking out
for marigolds to finger and sniff.
...

I must express not what I know
but what I do not know
until the poem is written.
This is no English lesson on, say, C.H. Sisson;
nothing deliberate here;
I am not sifting through a set work
for an exam that will be marked in Cambridge, England.
This is something like the heart-break that a tree . . .
it grew elbows with funny bones,
just outside the ladies' changing room,
P.O. Colleen Bawn. Once I peeped
and saw, I think, a pair of knees,
to which I now add nipples and a bounce.

I know that we do not belong,
wife, child, puppy, sweet peas,
to this brown land; nor in Somerset
where Sisson lives. But something like the heart-
break that a road . . . two strips of tar
that smelt, when afternoons grew hot
in Colleen Bawn, or liquorice,
to which I now add all sorts
of sweet rememberances.

I know that we are merely visitors in Africa -
the blue eyes of our child, the marmalade,
the pets, the BBC. And when I went to London
to find some British poets
shuffling verses for a game of rhyme,
I was a visitor.
It's something like the heart-break that a roof . . .
the first hot drops of Bulawayo rain
that pound the corrugations of my mind
releasing songs of leaves and earth and tin,
to which I add:
I understand you well enough Charles Hubert Sisson.
First, that you are a man of ability:
your poet's tact to express not what you know
but what you do not know until the poem is written.
...

That was in the days of the old strip road,
before the merger, before the quarry
started looking like my Dad; long before
the fighting. I am thinking of a time,
a time of syringa-berry battles
and the stink of crushed marigolds as we
Fred, Tazwill, my sister Pat - maybe Bob
if it was school holidays - untangled
our childhood. Round and round the yard we rushed
until the landlocked sky shook starlings
out of its blue. Before the puffadder
killed Joe; before Mom stopped making konfyt
from watermelon skins; before Joji
Sibanda (who taught me Sindebele
swear words) was put in jail. It was a time
of bulldogs, and chickens, and vegetables
from the garden: capiscums, horse-radish,
pumpkin . . . and fruit. Our paw-paws were sweeter
than sugar. Even our lemons were sweet.
Remember Granny Trot's mulberry jam?
That was before she stared fading down
the distance of her colonial eyes;
before we moved on full tar to the house
in the village; before my Dad's profile
was blasted away; just before the land-mines
started to appear. Then Joe. Then the way
our St. Joseph's lilies stopped making flowers.
It could have been the granite sand. It could
have been the hot October wind. It could
have been the rattle of choppers. It could
have been a time for lilies to sicken
in the gathering shriek of cicadas.
...