The Only Brunette on the Beach
The only brunette on the beach,
I keep a safe distance from the sun,
my eye on the smalt-blue sea
where the Kraken sleeps.
Adamastor holds his stormy breath.
The Flying Dutchman lies becalmed.
Perhaps he has no wish for harbour
here, now, after all those years
under full press of sail, cursing
this Cape of Storms.
O brave new world, after the deluge,
to escape, so narrowly, unharmed –
my tide-swept landing without Indiaman,
or ark. On the old battleground
of Bloubergstrand I lie and track
the ferny singe of lightning flowers,
but know, as lost as one of Nonqawuse’s
wretched cows, I have the drowning mark.
*Isobel Dixon grew up in South Africa, and now lives in Cambridge, England. Her collection A Fold in the Map is published by Salt. Her next collection, The Tempest Prognosticator, comes out from Salt in July 2011.
This poem first appeared in The Warwick Review and will be published in the forthcoming collection The Tempest Prognosticator (Salt, July 2011)
Note:
The mythical Adamastor was a symbol of the forces of nature in Luis de Camoes’s 16th Century Portuguese epic poem Os Lusiadas. Nonqawuse
was a 19th century Xhosa girl whose prophecies led many in the nation
to kill their cattle, believing that the ancestor spirits would arise to
drive the British settlers into the sea.