Tuesday 22 March 2016

A poem by Ingrid Jonker (1933-65): 'Ek het gedink...'

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.



To see the original poem, go to here

1 comment:

John Irons said...

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.