Heights
Can your knees hold your body as you go down
To the ground in front of me?
Will your eyes catch mine, or will they fade
Away?
The struggle to leave the high,
Now down in front of you—
You catch me before I die.
The dark night alone in Johannesburg,
Thought there would be no one,
But you helped—yes, I survived.
- Pieter Lategan.
27 October 2024 21:56
Pretoria, South Africa
About “Heights”
“Heights” moves quietly between extremes - between elevation and collapse, desire and withdrawal, presence and absence. It speaks from within a space where intensity is not abstract, but lived.
The poem does not separate love from struggle. Instead, it allows them to exist together. The same force that pulls upward also exposes vulnerability. The same closeness that offers relief carries risk. Nothing is simplified.
In this tension, intimacy becomes structural. It is not decorative or romanticised - it is necessary. A form of holding. A way of remaining when everything else begins to fall away.
There is a quiet Johannesburg behind the poem - wide, distant, and isolating. Against this, the presence of another person becomes significant. Not as escape, but as grounding. As weight.
What the poem leaves behind is not resolution, but continuation. A sense that survival is not loud. It is built slowly, through connection, through return, through the decision to remain.
“Heights” holds this space carefully - where fragility and strength exist at the same time.
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