The Tartar Swept (by August Kleinzahler)

The Tartar Swept (by August Kleinzahler)

Original Text
August Kleinzahler, The Strange Hours Travelers Keep (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003). This poem is reproduced on the Griffin Prize Web Site (from the winning volume on the 2004 International Shortlist).
1The Tartar swept across the plain
2In their furs and silk panties
3Snub-nosed monkey men with cinders for eyes
4Attached to their ponies like centaurs
5Forcing the snowy passes of the Carpathians
6Streaming from defiles like columns of ants
7Arraying their host in a vasty wheel
8White, gray, black and chestnut steeds
910,000 each to a quadrant
10Turning, turning at the Jenuye’s command
11This terrible pinwheel
12Gathering speed like a Bulgar dance
13Faster and faster
14Until it explodes, columns of horsemen
15Peeling away in all the four directions
16Hard across the puszta
17Dust from their hooves darkening the sky
18They fall upon village and town
19Like raptors, like tigers, like wolves on the fold
20Mauling the sza-szas
21And leaving them senseless in puddles of goaty drool
22Smashing balalaikas
23Ripping the ears off hussars and pissing in the wounds
24They for whom the back of a horse
25Is their only country
26For whom a roof and four walls is like unto a grave
27And a city, ptuh, a city
28A pullulating sore that exists to be scourged
29Stinky dumb nomads with blood still caked
30On shield and cuirass
31And the yellow loess from the dunes of the Takla Makan
32And the Corridor of Kansu
33Between their toes and caught in their scalps
34Like storm clouds in the distance
35Fast approaching
36With news of the steppes, the lagoons and Bitter Lakes
37Edicts, torchings, infestation
38The smoke of chronicles
39Finding their way by the upper reaches
40Of the Selinga and the Irtysh
41To Issyk-Kul, the Aral, and then the Caspian
42Vanquishing the Bashkirs and Alans
43By their speed outstripping rumor
44Tireless mounts, short-legged and strong
45From whose backs arrows are expertly dispatched
46As fast as they can be pulled from the quiver
47Samarkand, Bukhara, Harat, Nishapur
48More violent in every destruction
49This race of men which had never before been seen
50With their roving fierceness
51Scarcely known to ancient documents
52From beyond the edge of Scythia
53From beyond the frozen ocean
54Pouring out of the Caucasus
55Surpassing every extreme of ferocity
56From the Don to the Dniester
57The Black Sea to the Pripet Marshes
58Laying waste the Ostrogoth villages
59Taking with them every last cookie
60Then dicking the help
61These wanton boys of nature
62Who shot forward like a bolt from on high
63Routing with great slaughter
64All that they could come to grips with
65In their wild career
66Their beautiful shifting formations
67Thousands advancing at the wave of a scarf
68Then doubling back or making a turn
69With their diabolical sallies and feints
70Remorseless and in poor humor
71So they arrived at the gates of Christendom
RPO poem Editors
Ian Lancashire
RPO Edition
2011