(from Peter Henry Lepus in ‘Iraq, 2003’)

Are all Arabs Muslims? Peter Henry asks.

Nobody answers him.

She’s got dark hair that stops

just above her shoulders.  Turns up at the ends.

She’s very slim, Max says.

He’s talking to Hamid

about Weasel Smith’s girlfriend,

whom he is hoping to meet

somewhere south of Baghdad.

Do you have a wife in Australia? Hamid

politely asks.

Max snorts, Peter thinks, like one

of Hamid’s camels.  Then, less rudely,

I’m not married, Max says, though I might

if it works out with Braid.

Looking from one

to the other, they are sitting on same-size camels,

Peter sees Hamid

looks much bigger

                       & taller

                             than Max;

                                          he remembers

his mother’s puzzled recall

of an oral lore,

                        passed down

from unknowable rabbits,

                                    living

                                             perhaps centuries

                                                                     before:

It is not polite

to be rude to those

                          who are

                                       larger

                                                than oneself.

He remembers, too, that,

though she kicked with extreme ferocity,

when tunnelling earth,

& could, in adversarial conversations,

be vigorous, as well as firm,

she’d not been rude to anyone.

Peter has been studying his notebook,

somewhat awkwardly, from the back

of the third camel. Clifta – minus her cargo pants —

is hiding under the pommel. He has noticed,

since she’s grown a little taller,

they have not fitted her well.

There is a dead Iraqi

wrapped in Max’s plastic ground sheet

roped stiffly to the camel’s side.

Al Shualla – a fictional location that may or may not relate to an actual one which is spelled differently.

Clifta is a junior Huntsman Spider who has been travelling for some time with Peter Henry in Iraq.