Liz Atkin
A Few Minutes in a Western
I left the country lane to climb
the sudden, towering slag mountain,
blue grey baked and cinderous
a steep and narrow path wound up
to a vast plateau, a prairie cracked
with fissures, stamped with hoof prints.
The midday sun was scorching down,
the expected pool not there,
just crumbling canyons full
of bottomless shadow and bone-white wood,
the remains of an old trading post.
Now I noticed the dead trees,
strange spiky weeks and buffalo skulls
near shrugged snake skins, above me
wheeling birds cried mournfully
then shrieked, at first concealing
the distant curdling whoops and yells
of Apaches on the warpath.
I crouched and ran, scrambling
and slipping back down the path,
then turned and looked up to see
a line of boys watching me,
each one straddling a bike
motionless along the skyline.
Page(s) 22
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