DOWN IN THE CREVASSE OF LANGUAGE by Henk Rossouw

by Henk Rossouw / Tuesday, 14 November 2023 / Published in ISSUE 28

I was born among
speech-prone animals,

blind to all but the sliver
above. I see the hawks

often there—inseparable,
a pair, red-shouldered. Omen

of tall woods and water.
The first hawk oak-alighted

to hunt the bridle path,
the second circling, her kee-aah

letting the other birds
—at the rim of perception—

know of my unknowing?

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About Henk Rossouw

Henk Rossouw’s debut Xamissa (Fordham University Press, 2018) won the Poetic Justice Institute Editor’s Prize. His chapbook The Water Archives was included in the 2018 box set New-Generation African Poets. Poems have been featured in POETRY, The Paris Review, and World Literature Today, among other places. Henk teaches at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. He’s a consulting editor for the African Poetry Book Series at the University of Nebraska Press.