Caravanserai Poem by Richard George

Before we were men and women
we drank morning milk in a chalk mine.
It smelt, and we raced from kissing.
In the playground, I gazed up
at a white ledge on summer-blue:
'minaret', in a key unknown
to cosy hymns our blunt recorders
bottle-topped to. I hushed,
my feet so little calloused
I could feel the grit our knees bloodied -
a camel's kick - smooth into sand
and the brush of a pale robe.
It is from here we set out to become
strangers, the lambs we were
invisible as our bones