Cappadocia
A hard slog up the climbing roadway
Through the Toros mountains
Wide sedimentary formations
In bold zig-zag patterns
Gash their way across the hill-sides
Into the forbidding landscape
Yet dwarfed by volcanic cones
Whose igneous stones lie scattered
Forgotten playthings
Among the canyons and valleys
Isolated boulders amongst the scrub
Sparse trees and shrubs
Struggle in the high, dry climate
Amongst the debris and tuff-pinnacles
The ground itself crumbling and flaking
Between high rock-hewn promontories
Cheese-hole riddled
With caves and grottoes
Church-studded once
Faded frescoes and carvings
Sheltering monks and acolytes
And the very poorest people
Who eked a living from this place
And in this colour-bleached waste
The basalt and the sandstone
Engage in unequal battle
Pitted against unrelenting elements
Of driving desert-dry winds
Which sand-blast every feature
Smoothing into roundness
Revealing little of the harshness
Of this high plateau’d land-locked steppe
Where strong light casts hard shadows
Of tumbling pigeons
Which flutter here undisturbed
Small creatures in a vast landscape
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