The pipe gleamed with the heat passing through
And once I rested my hand upon its bough
And felt the slow harsh burning of my skin,
Then I was warned not to touch it again
Amongst other things – she kept everything.
The sound of rustling beads hanging in the wooden frame
Would tell of someone entering the kitchen,
And through the numerous sliding doors one could find the
Deep square bath where ships would drown,
The pink plastic bowl used to rinse one’s hair when our bodies
Rested contorted upon the rubber floor,
Outside we could hear the wind whistle and ripple the paper screens
Whilst within their glass boxes white dolls gazed out in their open eyed sleep,
In the morning steady rhythms beat from a wooden knuckle and
Rose to touch the ceiling of the house and descend again onto a reed floor,
The stepping stones ran always to the house
Whether crushed by thick drapes of icy snow or unmasked before the summer glare
That lit up all the blood of the mountains trickling into open fields of velvet earth,
And when we needed to our feet would take us down the road
To a row of shops outside of which I’d stare at the dispensing machines
Marvelling at their hidden plastic treasure,
Then we would return and guide our bodies through the beaded waterfall
And sit round the table late at night and listen to the murmur of the village.
Catherine Kei Lawford 2008
Click the heading for a short video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GVhj9znTGrg of the chimes played every evening across the village
To the North-West I looked, and in the wide field of my glass, saw plain the bright glare of the fire from the Red Pit, shine upwards against the underside of the vast chin of the North-West Watcher--The Watching Thing of the North-West. . . .
Beyond these, South and West of them, was the enormous bulk of the South-West Watcher, and from the ground rose what we named the Eye Beam--a single ray of grey light, which came up out of the ground, and lit the right eye of the monster. . .
There rose the vast bulk of the South-East Watcher--The Watching Thing of the South-East. And to the right and to the left of the squat monster burned the Torches; maybe half-a-mile upon each side; yet sufficient light they threw to show the lumbered-forward head of the never-sleeping Brute.
And, so to tell more about the South Watcher. A million years gone, as I have told, came it out from the blackness of the South, and grew steadily nearer through twenty thousand years; but so slow that in no one year could a man perceive that it had moved.
Yet it had movement, and had come thus far upon its road to the Redoubt, when the Glowing Dome rose out of the ground before it--growing slowly. And this had stayed the way of the Monster; so that through an eternity it had looked towards the Pyramid across the pale glare of the Dome, and seeming to have no power to advance nearer.
And, presently, I was come upward almost to the top of the hill, the which took me nigh three hours. And surely, when I was come that I could see the grimness of the Lesser Pyramid, going upward very desolate and silent into the night, lo! an utter shaking fear did take me; for the sweet cunning of my spirit did know that there abode no human in all that great and dark bulk; but that there did await me there, monstrous and horrid things that should bring destruction upon my soul. And I went downward of the hill, very quiet in the darkness; and so in the end, away from that place.
