Shortlisted
My Life in Gobi Desert
Korean International School, Nabilah Ismail,Poetry: Group 3
The Camel’s Hump
The Camel’s hump is an ugly lump.
The sand was soft and smooth, as we gently slightly passed through.
But slowly we travelled down through the dust and heat
Not a road from the Gulf to the Border but carried the print of the camel’s feet.
The creek by the road was dry;
The sun like a burning wagon-wheel rolled down in the western sky.
The dust was white on the saltbush, the ruts were deep in the road,
And the camel behind me grunted at every lurch of his load.
A dust-whirl rose in the bushes and circled into the sky,
The shells on my harness rattled as its burning breath went by.
In the Gobi desert, around the dying place of the dragons, the skeleton of a bison was found,
with its head toward the sky, as we passed and heard eerie sounds.
We saw dinosaur eggs everywhere, in the middle of nowhere. I started to shiver like an
earthquake with great fear, that something shouldn’t appear.
We ran and ran in a hurry, suddenly we were running out of energy and felt really thirsty. It
was so plain here, how could we survive without food or water, “Oh dear!”.
We all were so hot and soaked with sweat, and soon we came up and met a pet. Discovery of a
spiky cactus with thorns, we announced our existence to it but our bleeding finger mourns.
Now we have sore throats and wore big fluffy coats. We couldn’t survive any longer, soon we
might end up six feet under.
We had a hard time passing through all those branches, tick tock tick tock the
time passes.
We kept going and met another family, they also felt unhappy. They all worked together as a
team and they called their team ‘Clean’.
And now we were clinging to a stream, with closed memory, gloom in our dreams? We drank
as much as we could before continuing our journey and felt like we wanted to eat a turkey.
We couldn’t believe it, we heard a helicopter flying towards us.
We prayed to God and cried a bit, and were happy to be saved by the rescue guy
named Gus.
We went back home to where we belonged, such is right I will bear all the wrong.
