Film finished, I raise the shutter by my seat
Seven-and-a-half hours out of Hong Kong
And peer out, blinking through the dazzling light
Onto the sun-lit brilliance below. My eyes
Adjust to a landscape formed a million years ago
Or maybe only ten: vast fractals of cream
Flowing between banks of dried-up streams
That once fed now long-evaporated lakes
Across which clouds cast shadows I mistake
For a mirage of shifting oases.
The screen in the seat in front of me shows
We’re nearing an inland body of water
That can only be the Caspian Sea.
And between us we guess we’re flying over
Not Afghanistan or Uzbekistan but —
What’s the other one called? Yes, Kazakhstan
About which I know nothing, except that
Alexander the Great fought his way through here
On his way to conquer India
And left his seed in the blue eyes of the Kazakhs.
Today, it’s the blue-eyed boys from NATO,
Drawn not by their women but, more fervently,
Their 30 billion barrels of petroleum
The Kazakhs have to worry about defending.
In this, the ninth largest country in the world,
I can only spot a handful of roads
Crossing hundreds of miles in Roman-straight lines
That converge like stars then shoot out again
Through fields flecked with the shadows of rigs
Pumping day and night for their EU clients.
Ahead, to the south and west, lies a city
The screen names as Zhanaozen, meaning
New River in a land where water is life
To parched souls in the winds of this desert
Where nothing grows but oil and uranium
And gold. The flight attendant wants to know:
Do I want steamed pork with pak choy and rice
Or braised chicken and potato? And what
Wine would I like with lunch? The light is blinding.
I pull down the shutter and order the house white.
— London, July 2024
• • • • •
A fairly faithful report of a moment on my flight from Hong Kong to London, although I believe we had already been served lunch at the time, and dinner was a few hours away. But the menu is accurate. Three days later, in a pub in Soho, I spoke with three Kazakhstanis, the first I had ever met in my life, and to whom I recounted some of the details of my half-written poem. They knew the landscape well, and one even had a relative living in Zhanaozen. His wish, he said, was to break up the mining-dependent cities into smaller agricultural communities that could bring life to, and live off, the arid landscape.
A Communist in Hong Kong 
Thirty billion barrels? Copper and gold? Zhanaozen meaning New River? Ninth-largest country in the world?
Didn’t you say earlier in the poem that Kazakhstan is a country about which you know nothing? 😉
I’ll never forget (as these stories often go), quite some time ago now, flying over Iran, and having been bumped up to first class, going to the first-class WC to change into the pyjamas (!) a hostess handed me when I came on-board (a colleague I later told thought this was “insane”) to find the toilet had what I can only describe as a large port-hole. Standing behind it in my pyjamas, I watched what I imagined were the Zagros mountains passing far below.
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