SUMMER
Summer climbs the mountains. Flowers overcolour and blanch. Men leave the sun and sit, tree-tented, by the cold creek. Horses bray, each apart in the warm air, and the long grass whiffles in a lime plain. Hushed and still, the horseherd stand in whiter-high; and wave the flies away with silk-swish tails; and colts clatter the air, rippling the quiet, and lifted eyes. Geese hoot through certain blue. Ducks slip past, water-brushing. Girls frame the tents, their soft voices melting in the heat. The boss rides back from his sheep, smiling through tent-town, clopping with warm slow time, his hat a tilted effect. And old-timers suck round the milk-hooch bag, their say-again stories fired in their laugh-again eyes. The stewmeat steams. A boy tugs his mother’s spoon. The bosses sit in a curl of time on light-swirled carpets, under a languid tilt, and suck their tea and talk and talk in mannered turn. A rheumy old grouch shouts at the shepherds’ dust, one ear on his own brave show. No other ear heras more than heat and quiet: and talk runs on, creek-like, with the creek. The herdsmen, strutting-young, rock coolly in their saddles, parading back from night-time grazing, dressed to see, and riding twice their blood. Way past the tents in the softened heat the boss’s son casts falcons with his friends. Their horses mouth the close, bright air. The bird drills up along the sky and nails a heat-blown goose. And the rheumy old grouch, coughing in the shepherds’ dust, stares, unwatched, and hot with sadness that his glory is all gone.
(Abai Kunanbaev)
http://www.amazon.com/Selected-Poems-Abai-Kunanbayev/dp/B000KBH7TG
