Wednesday, April 11, 2012

Desert dunes

Desert dunes before the morning light caught fire.


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Sandrise


I left the hut when all the stars
had left the sky
but day was yet to come.

I walked a virgin sea of sand
where lizard tracks
in drunken routeways ran.
A silent expectation toned the air.

Then she came –
a pinprick, red between two distant peaks,
then a brimming dewdrop;
brilliant condensate of orange light
inflating with a sigh of heat.

Quivering she grew;
till bigger than the distant hills
which framed her birth.

Silently untethered from the gravity of earth she rose
in bouyancies of brightness
to the surface of the sky.

Then the monochrome light of morning melts away;
colours run across the world until the sand
is a sea of yellows and gold
and the sky is an ocean of blues.

Shadows arrive, seeping up through the sand
and with deft liquid touch
etch black inks on the land.

There among curved shadows of the dunes
and corrugated shadows of the sand,
the shadow of a person stands
and mimics every move I make.

This genie of the sands may mock my moves
and yet his gnomon shadow
points unerringly to home.

As little children do..

Under the desert moon
I walked the dry skeletal land
stumbling over black contorted
bones of rock.

Barren as a brickyard in the dark:
only ants and spiders moved across the clinkered ground.
In the torchlight spider eyes
reflected golden green.

A soft wind teased the tent,
the fabric skin breathed slowly out and in,
leaving secret whispers in the air.

Cicadas in the wadi sung
and on the very edge of hearing
distant waves were booming in the night.

And I am somewhere in the dark
above a nameless wadi
on an arid peninsula
in a foreign land.

No rhyme or reason to it all,
just the deep, deep draw of solitude
that needs to be alone
to learn to wonder once again
as little children do.

(c) A McN 

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Moon setting


Gibbous moon going down at 3am in the desert.

(c) A McN