SILKE HEISS
  • Home
  • About
    • Fan Feedback
    • Gratitude
    • Contact Silke
  • Writing
    • Poetry
      • Poetry Index
      • Poetry images
      • Poetry Themes
      • The Butterfly Poems
    • Prose
  • Publications
    • Reviews
  • Give Your Writing the Edge
    • Newsletter Archive
    • GYWTE Workshop
    • Hiku Hikes
  • Gallery
  • Blog
    • Subscribe to Blog
  • Newsletter Archive
  • Give Your Writing The Edge Nuggets
  • Hiku Hikes
  • Home
  • About
    • Fan Feedback
    • Gratitude
    • Contact Silke
  • Writing
    • Poetry
      • Poetry Index
      • Poetry images
      • Poetry Themes
      • The Butterfly Poems
    • Prose
  • Publications
    • Reviews
  • Give Your Writing the Edge
    • Newsletter Archive
    • GYWTE Workshop
    • Hiku Hikes
  • Gallery
  • Blog
    • Subscribe to Blog
  • Newsletter Archive
  • Give Your Writing The Edge Nuggets
  • Hiku Hikes
Search
Poetry

Poetry

 
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. 
Poetry Index
Poetry Images
Poetry Themes
Butterfly Poems

The Blue-Eyed Gander

The 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 Sorry

The 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 frog

My 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

​Goal 

On 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 Toast

You 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 Altar

You 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
Picture
Picture
Picture
Picture
Picture
Powered by Create your own unique website with customizable templates.
  • Home
  • About
    • Fan Feedback
    • Gratitude
    • Contact Silke
  • Writing
    • Poetry
      • Poetry Index
      • Poetry images
      • Poetry Themes
      • The Butterfly Poems
    • Prose
  • Publications
    • Reviews
  • Give Your Writing the Edge
    • Newsletter Archive
    • GYWTE Workshop
    • Hiku Hikes
  • Gallery
  • Blog
    • Subscribe to Blog
  • Newsletter Archive
  • Give Your Writing The Edge Nuggets
  • Hiku Hikes