When Laurens van der Post one night
    In the Kalihari Desert told the Bushmen
        He couldn't hear the stars
Singing, they didn't believe him. They looked at him,
    Half-smiling. They examined his face
        To see whether he was joking
Or deceiving them. Then two of those small men
    Who plant nothing, who have almost
        Nothing to hunt, who live
On almost nothing and with no one
    But themselves, led him away
       From the crackling thorn-scrub fire
And stood with him under the night sky
    And listened. One of them whispered,
        Do you not hear them now?
And van der Post listened, not wanting
    To disbelieve, but had to answer,
        No. They walked him slowly
Like a sick man to the small dim
    Circle of firelight and told him
        They were terribly sorry,
And he felt even sorrier
    For himself and blamed his ancestors
        For their strange loss of hearing,
Which was his loss now. On some clear nights
    When nearby houses have turned off their visions,
        When the traffic dwindles, when through streets
Are between sirens and the jets overhead
    Are between crossings, when the wind
        Is hanging fire in the fir trees,
And the long-eared owl in the neighboring grove
    Between calls is regarding his own darkness,
        I look at the stars again as I first did
To school myself in the names of constellations
    And remember my first sense of their terrible distance,
        I can still hear what I thought
At the edge of silence were the inside jokes
    Of my heartbeat, my arterial traffic,
        The C above high C of my inner ear, myself
Tunelessly humming, but now I know what they are:
    My fair share of the music of the spheres
        And clusters of ripening stars,
Of the songs from the throats of the old gods
    Still tending even tone-deaf creatures
        Through their exiles in the desert.

On my first day of school
My first friend was a boy
Who laughed at everything
We did on the playground.

He laughed on the high swings
And laughed on the teeter-totter
And laughed when he fell down
At the sound of the school bell.

His eyes squeezed shut. His cheeks
Crinkled against his nose.
His chin came jutting forward
And his mouth went Haw haw haw.

And I laughed too, but stopped
When we all marched up the stairs
And into the first grade
Of John Greenleaf Whittier

Grade School to learn how
To count and spell our names
And grow up and sing songs
And listen and sit still.

But my friend wouldn’t behave.
He pointed at me and pointed
Around the room and stared
And laughed and sang to himself.

At noon, the teacher whispered
In his ear, gave him a note,
And said he should go now.
He cried. He cried like a baby,

And I walked home with him
Along the sandstone alley
To the tall gray broken house
Where his father read the message—

A quiet man, as short
As we were, with a mustache,
Suspenders, and four teeth—
Who told him to go to bed.

And that’s what my friend did.
His father took a breath,
Nodded, shook my hand,
Smiled, and gave me an apple,

And as I crossed their yard,
My friend in a nightgown
Leaned out the attic window
And called my name and laughed.