Some Poems from Central Asia

Over the past twelve months, I’ve been lucky enough to visit four countries in Central Asia. As I travel, I scribble all sorts of notes; a few of these turn into poems, or at least something that’s like poetry. Perhaps you’ll find something that prompts your curiosity in the following pieces.

Jalal’s Country
Stalls line the road, crude simple display for commercial trade.
There are bags of tomatoes and capsicums, sacks of fat carrots
and onions and potatoes. Dough fries in vats of bubbling oil.
Yoghurt drinks are decanted into clay bowls, vendors pile discs of bread
to great heights. You can buy porcelain, wool, cotton, plastic.

They sell computer cables, cement pavers, electric kettles.

I walk through with my hands in my pockets, reluctant as ever
to become “part of the exchanging flow”. Until a ten-year-old girl
grabs my wrist and hassles me for money. She mocks my voice

then shoves me towards the busy road. There is anger in her eyes.

Mine are tired, and maybe jaded. The little beggar feels like the world,
pushing and pulling, and I am left without translations, no intermediary.

I swing my arm free from her and cross the street, and after this encounter,
I read the words of the local poet. “‘Where did you go? Nowhere.
What did you eat? Nothing much.’”

(Boysun, Uzbekistan)

A Child Among Horses
There, where wild horses
graze on beige acres,
and men in fields fling
piles of hay into ute trays,
or tend to beehives, or ride donkeys,
or just squat on the roadside
in padded garments – there
I met a child, four years old,
already treated like a lord.
The last to be born
into this dusty, timber-strewn,
slow-motion, equestrian world.

As we travelled together west
he clutched his mother’s smartphone
like it was a talisman.
(Saty, Kazakhstan)

Sketch of a Local Hero
Journeys like this – long road trips on rutted cattle tracks,
the route through grey desert, in slow-motion,
everyone shaken, juddering – on journeys like this, I think of her.

She’d unfurl a length of heavy paper here,
and a thin pen, with fine ink, and draw what she saw,
visual fragments, all of it disembodied,

freed from this dirt and dust, floating, without gravity.
In mid-air, there would be apples bunched on sprawling branches
and horses hovering, and cross-hatched brush fences,

crescent moons, crows’ wings, brutalist bus shelters –
none of which would have foundations, everything
so enviably untethered – weather stations,

haybales, gravestones, coppiced planes,
sentences in Chinese and Cyrillic scripts.
All of it uprooted from this country of grit.

I see, across several fields, potato harvesters,
colourful dressed, stooped over their crop,
stuffing the vegetables into free-standing bags.

She would sketch their curving backs in sinuous lines
and release them from the earth. Levitating curlicues,
like plants without roots.

Likewise, local legends live in ballads, each epic hero
entwined with the storyteller that sung of him.
(Yssyk-Kol, Kyrgyzstan)

Wildflower
In this country, I am like
a wildflower blooming
from a cracked rock
in the middle of a stream
which has flooded
and has no name.

(Kuli Chuqurak, Tajikistan)

Flight
WHERE IN THE FIREPLACE Tbilisi
WHERE GOD Almaty
FLIGHT KC 0140
CLASS S
FLYING AWAY VYLET 29 AUG 22:20
FLYING IN PRILET 30 AUG 03:55
His Majesty STATUS OK
THE WAY IS LOADED LUGGAGE 1pc
(automatic translation from an airline ticket)