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Silke has published much of her poetry to her blog, as well as her Facebook Page https://www.facebook.com/GiveYourWritingTheEdge/https://www.facebook.com/GiveYourWritingTheEdge/
Her astonishing book of poems, Greater Matter, tracks the love between her and her late husband, Norman Morrissey, beyond his death. The Blue-Eyed GanderThe blue-eyed gander
was suspicious of us. His goose had laid his egg. The experienced owner caught him, held him, a soft, white bomb under one arm. Onto one knee, a blue-eyed knight, he offered the gander to me. I stroked the snowy fleece, smooth, cool, light, and its owner wound round his long neck, looking back with his blue eyes at me. All things remain in God, who is myself, the knight, the feather, the eyes, the egg, the goose, and the perceptive gander, who understood perfectly, as in a dream, my meander into his stream. This poem was first published under the pseudonym Aurora Jean in Surrendering Thoughts (2002), ed. Chantal Thomson, Poetry Institute of Africa, Scottburgh; then again in Love Gyres (2011), Simonstown; and again in McGregor Poetry Festival 2015 Anthology, (2016) African Sun Press, Cape Town, ISBN 978-0-620-70228-7 Never SorryThe trees
around the village green speak with their leaves in ways they never have to be sorry for. Published in Hogsback Hiku (2013), with Norman Morrissey, Hogsback; and again in McGregor Poetry Festival 2015 Anthology, (2016) African Sun Press, Cape Town, ISBN 978-0-620-70228-7 Paper comb frogMy father sometimes played
a comb with paper folded over it – it made a weird nasal, skewed set of musical notes. I never thought I’d hear it again. I haven’t, in fact, but there was a frog today, who, throughout the early hours, right through morning, threw this diagonal sort of short melody into the wet – a soloist making his mark against the rhythmic choir-boys doing their job. Him, it’s him I’ll go for, I thought on my pillow, forgetting for a moment that I was not a Miss Frog. Freud had it wrong. I’m not in love with my father or with singing amphibians. But both my father and this unusual frog play a different tune to that of the run of the mill, or supermarket playlists, rather, nowadays. Ears are a female’s most precious asset. And her nose. But that’s another poem. Published in Sound Piping (2015), Ecca Poets, Hogsback, ISBN 978-0-620-66405-9 GoalOn a winter’s day
those last pools of sunlight we catch. Published in Gold in Spring (2016), Ecca, Hogsback, ISBN 978-0-620-72983-3 Solitary ToastYou switch off lights,
take glasses of water to place at our bedsides. I sit at the coals that are not dying, but prevailing, tinkling like glass broken for a happy occasion. I drink a last half-chalice of wine - token to a happy evening spent simply in love. Published in Simply in Love (2013) with Norman Morrissey, Hogsback; and in Heart of Africa! Poems of love, loss and longing (2014), selected by Patricia Schonstein, African Sun Press, Cape Town, ISBN 978-0-620-60850-3 The Only AltarYou were the only man I knew
who knew to court me – who knew my inborn shyness was only deference to a given wildness – you trembled not, but treated it with awe. Were you the last to hold the precious purple-orange flame we've carried from the Minnesänger Age? I guard it now: this living heart, this Phoenix – and wish in loyalty to you some royal soul will know the day to help us carry on this way. Lover were you first, all sprang from it, fulfilled or not, and poems to serve that vital cause your sacraments upon the only altar where lilies live forever. Published in The Only Altar (2018), with Norman Morrissey, Hogsback |
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