Antjie Krog is, along with Breyten Breytenbach, one of South Africa’s most famous Afrikaans poets. She has won many awards, and recently has come to prominence as a writer of non-fiction with her book Country of My Skull. Down to my Last Skin (Random House), the first collection of her poems translated into English, was published in 2000.

the day surrenders to its sadness the day surrenders to its sadness over palm tree and roof the rain reigns mercilessly the small white house with trellis and high verandah stands like a warm cow her backside to the rain eyes tightly shut inside a woman moves from window to window as beautiful as sunlight through vine leaves as beautiful the drops on green the rain on avocado bark on the flintstone of leaves the bougainvillaea sparkling wet, sly keel green on apricots the double hibiscus groans desperate and red in the dark the intimacy inside is tangible children sleeping damp in their room the man in front of the heater with art book cigarette and wine his eyes glance up somewhat drenched in love dusk snuffles softly against the gutters a woman wanders from one steamed window to another and sees the house constantly from an outside perspective disabled and thanks to the light in every window barely conscious of the total magnitude a warm cow her backside to the rain           latin-american love song neither the moist intimacy of your eyelids fair as fennel nor the violence of your body withholding behind sheets nor what comes to me as your life will have so much slender mercy for me as to see you sleeping perhaps I see you sometimes for the first time you with your chest of guava and grape your hands cool as spoons your haughty griefs stain every corner blue we will endure with each other even if the sun culls the rooftops even if the state cooks clichés we will fill our hearts with colour and the fireworks of finches even if my eyes ride a rag to the horizon even if the moon comes bareback even if the mountain forms a conspiracy against the night we will persist with each other sometimes I see you for the first time           my words of love my words of love grow more tenuous than the sound of lilac my language frayed dazed and softened I feel myself through your stubborn struggle you still hold me close like no-one else you still choose my side like no-one else against your chest I lie and I confess you hunt my every gesture you catch up with me everywhere you pull me down between bush and grass on the footpath you turn me around so that I must look you in the eye you kick me in the balls you shake me by the skin of my neck you hold me, prick in the back, on the straight and narrow (translated by Karen Press)           marital psalm this marriage is my shepherd I shall not want in a swoon he loves me and lusts after me with disconcerting fitness man who makes me possible (though I can fight him spectacularly) (the way we make a double bed shows an undivided indestructible pact) sometimes he catches me by the hind leg as one big piece of solid treachery persecutes me fucks me day and night violates every millimetre of private space smothers every glint in my eye which could lead to writing "do our children successfully in respectable schools have to see how their friends read about their mother’s splashing cunt and their father’s perished cock I mean my wife jesus! somewhere a man’s got to draw the line" I will fear no evil the rod and the staff they comfort me           stripping while you undress I watch through my lashes that bloody thick cock prudish and self-righteous it hangs head neatly wrinkled and clear cut about its place between the balls – wincing in my direction and I think of its years and years of conquest night after fucking night through pregnancies menstruation abortion pill-indifference sorrow how many lectures given honours received shopping done with semen dripping on the everyday pad from all sides that blade cuts that cock goddamit does more than conquer it determines how generous the mood how matter-of-fact how daring the expenditure standing upright it is bend or open-up and you better be impressed my sister not merely lushy or horny but in bloody awe, yes! everything every godfucking thing revolves around the maintenance of cock and the thing has no heart no brain no soul it’s dictatorial a fat-lipped autocrat it besieges the reclusive clitoris a mister’s Mister somewhere you note numbers and statistics that morning in Paris and again that night your hands full of tit I am waiting for the day oh I look forward to the day the cock crumbles that it doesn’t want to that in a rosepoint pout it swings only hither and dither that it doesn’t ever want to flare but wiggle waggles unwillingly boils over like a jam pot or fritters away like a balloon and come it will come because rumour has it that for generations the women in my family kapater their men with yes with stares oh jesus, and then we slither away like fertile snakes in the grass taking shit from nobody and they tell me my aunts and my nieces and sisters they laugh and tell me how one’s body starts chatting then how it dances into tune at last coming home to its own juices           birth at last this lovely little mammoth godawful in roses and blood straining lovely between my legs tore loose tumbled, no slipped out besmeared into my arms yelling birth yelling pain yelling strength oh I throb throb throb about my boychild my onlyest my loveliest my smallest my most superlative sound wash him with colostrum his arms next to his body wrap him in nappies in a manger of songs shy murmurs from a twilight room and feed him feed him oh free feed him from my heart           how and with what? I dig rennets from the sink sieve oats and rinds burp into the drain outside the window the nappy liners are being stunk out into the toilet the dirty nappies sunlight soaped bottoms washed powdered the one cries with hunger the other with anger the eldest with his nervous vegetable knife voice carves a whole superman flight through the noise my man closes the door against us all and turns up the Mozart piano concerto and I go crazy my voice yells a mixerpulpershreddermincer my nose leaks like a fridge my eyes quake like eggs in boiling water my ears are post boxes pouting with calendars and junk mail my children assault me with their rowdiness            selfishness            cheekiness            destructiveness their fears complexes insecurities threats needs            beat my "image as mother" into soft steak on the wooden floor I smell of vomit and shit and sweat            of semen and leeks I illustrate a kitchen            with hair whipping dull against novilon skin            the milk coupons of my back bent uninterestedly inside the gown            the legs veined like blue soap            slippers like pot scourers I sulk like a flour bag I am chipped like a jug my hands drier and older than yesterday’s toast give half-hearted slaps against the clamour I go outside and sit on the step this Sunday morning neither sober nor embarrassed wondering how and with what does one survive this?           transparency of the sole the light over my desk streams into darkness I await my visitors on paper my four children finely balanced between anal and dorsal tiny fins at the throat constantly stirring eyes uncommonly soft in the shallow brackish water your mother treads clay with metaphors come here across dictionaries and blank pages how I love this delicate little school these fish of mine in their four-strong flotilla lure so close now what should I feed you? dear child of the lean flank yield to the seabed yes the stretching makes you ache but mother holds you to her mother is here the lower eye like father’s wondrous blue migrates cautiously with a complex bunching of nerve and muscle till it’s up beside the other pert little mouth almost pulled out of shape with time the tongue will settle in its groove pigment of the upper flank beginning to darken unobtrusive between sand and stone you lie meshed with bedrock never again to prey or take flight I press my mouth against each distended face mother knows you will survive the tide (translated by Denis Hirson)           for my son the earth hangs unfinished and when the wind starts the child stands in Kloof Street with his school bag child of mine! I call to his back there where my heart is tightest as always I am elsewhere I think him into almonds and arms full of pulled up light I trace his whispers in my matrix of blood shyly the child shoots across the street the wind takes his orthodontic drool it is me           your mother but his eyes are on the brink of leaving me the earth lies unfinished the wind splinters from him all that is child and I tighten about him past guilt past all neglect I love him way way beyond heart           ma will be late that I come back to you tired and without memory that the kitchen door is open I shuffle in with suitcases hurriedly bought presents my family’s distressed dreams slink down the corridor the windows stained with their abandoned language in the hard bathroom light I brush my teeth put a pill on my tongue: Thur that I walk past where my daughter sleeps her sheet neatly folded beneath her chin on the dressing table silkworms rear in gold that I can pass my sons frowning like fists against their pillows their restless undertones bruise the room that I can rummage a nightie from the drawer slip into the dark slit behind your back that the warmth flows across to me makes me neither poet nor human in the ambush of breath I die into woman           letter-poem lullaby for Ntombizana Atoo 1. hush-hush sleep-a-bye sweet sleep soft sleep whole sleep blackly tilted childest child of mine childling born wet born now outside orbits the earth so ah and you so softly bloused in blue let wind take your nostrils let earth take eyes and ears and tongue let fire let rain take your skin inside crackles your tongue your fists tiny roses clenched in plum you     you lay in a baylet for the last time made holy by blood and yourself shush now shush now childkin black     childkin veld childkin nobody to nothing ever held childkin breast      childkin thirst hush-hush sleep-a-bye sweet sleep soft sleep whole sleep blackly tilted   2. the wind is all over the sky with my voice on its way to you you who lies irrefutably stippled somewhere in cloth and herb in songlets and pain your vertebrae curving against what’s to come hold on dear child against it all that you could see the earth clinging with suns and moons and comets and meteorites the windfiltered sky in tufts of fire tomatoes fly out among leaves the moon reports in milk in the thorn trees next to the road      the stars also hum their way to you you have to see you have to hear how the sun lures the wind over your threshold taste how the water changes to still ivory plates in the setting sun dear child the earth glows of heaven   3. I will come and claim you from bones and bullets and violence and aids from muteness from stupidity from the corrupt faces of men I’ll gather you from millions of refugees from hunger and thirst from the damp of cries and the stink of tolerated grief the desperate mangle of dreams from the back I’ll recognise the brave stalk of your neck I will catch up with you and pull you out by the arm because you have to see differently for us Africans - us the children of the abyss we all have to balance differently this continent drifting like a big black plundered heart on the globe continent that is us continent throbbing with blood in the vast ventricles of desert      and forest savannah and stone forlorn continent on which so many lost figures commit lost deeds of forlorn trust big aggressive heart on which thousands die daily without sound decaying in heaps into raking brooms of bones I want it to be you my smallest that between your ribs you have to feel the tremor that things have to be different that something has to become true of what we are that what we are as Africans is something so soft so humanly skinned so profoundly constitutionally big and light and kind as soul so caring as to surpass all understanding motho ke motho ke batho babang rather we are what we are because we are of each other why do we keep on then being so wrong? I lay my cheek next to yours I want to breathe into you to care to care hush-hush   4. I want to join your shoulderblades into tiny wings      to breast the roaming despair lovely thing I am so close to you your cheek lies in peach down your necklet wobbles this side that side next to your mother who sleeps with her head turned towards you do you hear me? everything is so lucid tonight your mouth has loosened a little from the breast do you hear me? I who am all-that-is-white who am lightningwhite and indissolubly always only myself I want you to make this continent yours      bask in your hands this morose mumbling heart      cradle it so that Africa at last splays out its clogged crooked valves      rig its full sails to the wind and navigate the earth in celebration it has become yours it has become mine it is ours dark outside a chain rustles and I hear magazines slip off into the grass I stop breathing and bend over you my finger touching your fist which slips open and holds me immediately tightly your mother stirs loveliest thinniken thing I have just come to say hi! and welcome and that something of me will go with you and that you needn’t know of it   5. weep weep for the past centuries and their defeated mutilated survivors weep for the injustice and the closed perspective of greed how does one become new? how does one find a mechanism into the future underneath all this dictatorial dust and portions of obese scum the moment that humanity lifts her head let us recognise it! because the heart waits on her banner my eyes screw loose on the road to the millennium may the coming epoch belong to Africa revealed by an obstinate landscape of words and a little girl with wild plaits and cheeky slender neck making poems along the dusty road singing forward the way… (translated by the poet)