Your Love Is A Reality (Free Verse Sonnet)

(for Annelize, after Ingrid Jonker)

Your love is real to me although my heart is wounded
like coffee and rusks when the red day does come,
like my toes in the sand in the hot ground
and constantly you do astonish me,
where you do bring to the pain in life a kind of healing,
although my own life is torn open like the streets,
my heart wants to sing to you with joy
as you are noble like the flowers that cover the wilderness.
For me you are pure like the white arum lilies at the offspring
and where life with its mud does want to cling to everything
you do sprout out with beauty
as if you do fit perfectly into all of my days,
you are real to me and my hunger for you is great
as for fresh milk and home baked bread.

[Reference: “Die winter is ‘n krom ou vrou” (The winter is a bended old woman)by Ingrid Jonker.Poet’s note:Rusks are a South African traditional delicacy and are hard baked like biscuits, they are baked like this to be dipped into the coffee and eaten like that.]

© Gert Strydom