Evening on the Steppe

I’m on leave so I’m posting a bit more than usual. Here’s another short piece that sits better like this than as a poem.

 

Evening on the Steppe

A chill presses down on the grass the air settling on the steppe; a landscape purpose-built for the nomad.

A ger lies to the north, a white blemish on the distant and fading mountains, where fine green cloth folds over the granite beneath now washed in soothing evening light; lengthening shadows unmasking the ephemeral drainage gullies.

Mother and daughter, vivid in purples, whites and reds, lug water over river-worn rounded cobbles past a satellite dish gazing into the evening sky; hot yaks-milk tea, mutton stew and the television beckon.

Smoke winds skywards coiling around the first of the night’s stars, solitary in subtly deepening blue, from where the Tengre gazes down, straining to hear a shaman’s chants.

Somewhere Ghenghis Khan stares up, trampled by a thousand years of wild horses, not even remembered by a standing-stone.

Disposable

Disposable

What is it about suburban shopping centres that fleeces me of pleasure, saps me of energy, makes watching paint dry seem like fun?

Is it the old ladies with barely-controlled battering rams, youths reminding me of boundless energy, the arrogance of shop assistants chatting among themselves, oblivious to queues?

Is it the drones that hover decisionless, the brainwashed manic bargain hunters conditioned to desire, doomed to suffer a life of dissatisfaction?

Or perhaps it is the mountains of disguised junk, plastic rubbish, plastic food, attracting plastic money; saturated fats and sugar, interspersed with cheap clothes made in faraway sweatshops.

Disposable clothes, disposable ideas, disposable memories, disposable quality, all gathered together to pray for the disposable income of disposable people.

 

A very short story

Mrs McCluskey’s Memories.

 

The wind howled through the deserted town, stirring up clouds of dust, eddying through and around empty verandas, rattling windows now cracked and broken; suffering from the ravages of time’s relentless and merciless hand. A ghost town it would seem at first glance around the derelict and neglected streets now covered in weeds and dust, overlooked by old Mrs McCluskey still clinging on to the company of her memories and still happy in this isolated land.

She told me how this town had changed so quickly from being in its prime as a thriving noisy mining town, the centre of commerce for miles around, with its main street packed every Saturday and lively pub with an entertaining band. She told me how there had been mines nearby, about three she thought, pointing to overgrown mounds looking just like hills, but really old and weathered waste dumps left as the only reminder, other than the flooded pits above which they now stand.

She told me of all the wheeling and dealing and gambling and girls; excitment on at all hours of the day and night in her pub, or so she called it, though it sounded particularly sordid to me. I could see the light in her eyes, shining as vividly as the gold for which she’d once panned. I left Mrs McCluskey sitting on her veranda content with her vivid memories, and I left that virtual ghost town behind me, but as I drove away that morning, I couldn’t help but wonder how long it would be before Mrs McCluskey and the town disappeared forever beneath the shifting desert sand.

 

 

 

Truth (a very short story!)

That night we gazed up at the blood moon hanging above the trees. The soft illumination clearly showed it for the ball it is, not a disc, more like an orange malteser. It just goes to show how shedding too much light on something can obscure the truth.