Horsemen

Horsemen

Somewhere in an old magazine, a photograph:
nomad horsemen pause on the edge of the Gobi,
staring into white light on sand and alkali flats.
To the flat vague horizon nothing moves,
though a wind rustles their heavy capes.
You cannot see their faces, but their bodies
are braced to plunge down a slight slope
into a world of sand, of salt and sand.

We all ride into deserts: the wind urges us
onwards, onwards into that sterile landscape.
Behind us the smoking ashes of campsites,
faint echoes of songs, the debris of forgotten days:
ahead in the veiling haze, formless, unknowable,
something waits patiently in drifts of sand.