Seeing the long-grained barley
bending under its weight,
the old men shook their heads.
'Good harvests will draw them here sooner,
this charioteering horde', they said.
Their spoor was evident, fire-blackened towns
strung across the continent. They came
from desiccated pastures, brown
as a lion's pelt. A strange people
with nothing to leave behind but horse-dung,
nothing to carry except their weapons.

For months the city gates were closed,
for months the city gates dripped
with a trickle of fugitives
humping their possessions,
their infants forked upon the hips.
For months we were being squeezed out,
our houses were split,
our rooms divided into smaller rooms
and potter kilns established in the streets.
A fine kettle of fish it was:
we didn't want harvests
we didn't want children.

Migrations started as the gates
swung open. The city drained away
like a severed artery.
Every track radiating from the city
was crowded; even the women were running.
We could feel the invaders now,
the air turned tangy
with the scent of their coming.

We feared the night,
we should have feared the dawn.
Dust rose as their two-spoked wheels
sped towards us.
We had feared them for years,
these people new to aqueducts
and brick, granaries and grain,
people who had never seen a summer
burgeoning twice in the same place.
Now they were here, hair wind-blown,
eyes hard as quartz-flakes.
But it was the horses we feared,
those champers of bits and chewers of halters
their iron-shod hooves
flailing above our heads as they reared.
Their nostrils were wind-vents
jetting vapour in the crisp dawn air.
There was no escape, the high treble
of their neighing paralysed us;
their wheels marked furrows
over our squirming backs.

In the shatter and jig of conquest
who keeps count?
You fall where you please;
a woman chose a well,
another chose a rope;
axes rose and fell.
Only the dust spiralled up
and never came down.

So now you find us, aozy, calcinated
in history's forgotten grooves.
The years will not go round for us
threshing seasons under the hooves.