Sandstorm Poems

Shishi and I, just draped our doll,
Giggling, in the shade of a sacred scroll.

Stood by the well and eyed us long,
...

An assault of cabbage leaves on the pavement
Tries vainly to cover up the manholes;
Splattered egg yolk on the serrated kerb:
Two men look from the window. Wind blows.
...

When your thoughts still keep me awake,
I have no one besides stars and moon to converse.

All your promises fly like fireflies,
...

CHAPTER I

I cannot blame old Israel yet,
For I am not a sage—
I shall not know until I get
...

Ah, better the thud of the deadly gun, and the crash of the bursting shell,
Than the terrible silence where drought is fought out there in the western hell;
...

<i>For Justin Clemens

Fin-de-Siècle</i> France
much more congenial
...

The desert sand had covered most
of Ali's scrawny body,
his camel, down and bellowing
the sandstorm was ferocious.
...

Swirling around in the desert sky,
Where not even the ravens choose to fly.
Down off the mountains in a furious gale,
Darkening the desert sky so pale.
...

Memories
Flooding me
Like sandstorm
...

by Zhu Zhu
(translated by Denis Mair)

I
...

In Lidda, in Ramla, in the Galilee,
we shall remain
like a wall upon your chest,
and in your throat
like a shrad of glass,
a cactus thron,
...

What shakes the trees so violently? ’Tis Wind;
What moves the clouds hither/ thither? ’Tis Wind;
What takes the tornado around? ’Tis Wind;
What brings the sandstorm on the earth? ’Tis Wind.
...

Sand arose
covering everything
A windstorm
shut our eyes
...

The sandstorm swirls, pebbles and sand
Hitting dour walls
Dance, dance the slow music
Elements appeasing music
...

It’s a stop-over on a Spring day
when, walking through the bush, I see them.
Bees. Wild bees, already clustered,
...

Walled behind thoughts of yesterday, gradually turning away
from past tears, an individual stands alone in the middle
of a desert sandstorm.
...

'Oh! the howling of desert winds
You are blowing so fierce again
As you tried to restrain the minds
Of tough camels and sturdy men
...

Myths and spells of a faraway land
Where sun is like fire and skin is tanned
Travelling through the land of gods and pharaohs
My heart's pierced from love's arrows
...

I saw a traveller coming from the desert
wrapped in white cloth
and the man greeted me, asked for water
and told me about Ozymandias, the great king
...

She ponders the fidelity
Of the stars and the moon.
And she comes to me
Like an angry sandstorm
...

When your thoughts still keep me awake,
I have no one besides stars and moon to converse.

All your promises fly like fireflies,
...

Memories
Flooding me
Like sandstorm
...

The loss of god and my demons,
A time of distinct longing for all things unearthly,
Scattered illusions of unknown desires,
The restlessness of the soul, I feel ghostly.
...

Geneticist as driver, down the gene
codes in, let's say, a topless coupe
and you keep expecting bends,

real tyre-testers on tight
mountain passes, but instead it's dead
straight, highway as runway,

helix unravelled as vista,
as vanishing point. Keep your foot
down. This is a finite desert.

You move too fast to read it,
the order of the rocks, the cacti,
roadside weeds, a blur to you.

Every hour or so, you pass a shack
which passes for a motel here:
tidy faded rooms with TVs on

for company, the owner pacing out
his empty parking lot. And after
each motel you hit a sandstorm

thick as fog, but agony.
Somewhere out there are remnants
of our evolution, genes for how

to fly south, sense a storm,
hunt at night, how to harden
your flesh into hide or scales.

These are the miles of dead code.
Every desert has them.
You are on a mission to discover

why the human heart still slows
when divers break the surface,
why mermaids still swim in our dreams.
...

                  

Screwing the distance in this weird wind of dark
...

From dust to dust
A sandstorm of lives
Meld into tiny pebbles
Stinging
...

The Bitch

You came into my life the day I was marrying my dog
like a sandstorm out of the blue, it blinded me somehow
...

The light is cold, a lack-lustre unleavened white
threatening death, trying to burn eyes from their
sockets, a one-dimensional glare like a morgue
in overexposure; but with large, luminous insect
...

Hot sand, heated air curling upwards,
and a merciless, glaring orb above.
The camels tottered in their slow gait,
the bells around their necks
...

Hollow,
tide of the world has swept to me,
washing my thoughts, washing my mind.
This barage of opinion is vexatious,
...