Rustum Kozain
WONDER
What qualities move and inspire you in the poems you read, and how do you create those qualities when you sit down to write a poem yourself?
Rustum Kozain is a multi-award-winning poet, editor and essayist whose work often evokes heightened states of awareness through sparse, understated language. This month, he shared a beautiful, as yet unpublished, fragment from a poem called ‘That Ordinary Thing’ with The AVBOB Poetry Project.
Read the fragment he shared and discover how he describes the state of wonder we all sometimes experience in the presence of the unexpected.
Now as the sun draws water
in the late afternoon,
comes into my sight
a small and dark sudden hare
grazing in silence
or a-flicker under leaf and sun
it is a bird, squat down
as if set in a temple.
It moves, then is still
upright for a moment
gnawing at a sprig
its small body I think
its small heart beat
the dark hare
at the edge of the field
I stare
until my sight dulls,
blurs, aches
the hare
a shade taken by shadow
enraptured there beyond my knowing.
Apart from its smallness and the suddenness of its movements, we are given relatively little information about this small creature. This suddenness even makes it difficult for the speaker to be certain whether it is a hare or a small bird. Although the poem is not yet completed, the title also suggests that this animal is not particularly extraordinary in itself. Rather, it is its sudden closeness to the speaker that he finds so extraordinary. How does he make that sighting matter to us, so that it becomes as wondrous to us as it is to him?
To begin with, at the end of the second stanza, we are told that it looks as if the small animal has been “set inside a temple.” In other words, it has already taken on significance for him; a sacred message he is trying to interpret.
Then, in the third and fourth stanzas, punctuation marks almost completely disappear. Their absence creates a breathless, expectant quality, as if time itself has been interrupted. The poem’s focus has narrowed until only the speaker and the hare exist. It is only in the fifth stanza, as the hare is about to disappear, that punctuation returns and we draw breath again.
The fact that his sight “dulls, / blurs, aches” at the end of the poem is also significant. Is the hare really gone, or is he simply unable to see it? (It is so small that he could easily have missed it altogether.) The smallness of its body and heartbeat have added to the significance he attached to its sighting. Now, its disappearance is as mysterious to him as its sudden appearance. In the poem’s final line, which appears in a stanza of its own, he is alone once again. The only evidence that the hare was there is that he remembers it and created a record of it in this poem. It is only because of this record that we know he has been changed and enriched by what he saw.
Of course, one could try to explain the hare’s sudden appearance, but that would miss the point entirely. What Kozain has given us instead is an unforgettable description of what happens when our everyday awareness is heightened into surprise and wonder for a moment.
In the next few days, write a poem in which you try to evoke the wonder you felt in the presence of something unexpected.
The annual AVBOB Poetry Competition opens on 1 August 2026 and offers a cash prize of R10 000 in each language category. Visit www.avbobpoetry.co.za for details on how to participate.