CATOPTRICS Gliding over remote chasms, the haunted valley. Then winging through fleeting brilliant skies. My airy lairs. Vulture in the steep passes. It is I - a dreaming warlord, collecting and planning my aerial strategies. A soaring bird  of prey. Now hanging in the air I watch for movement, scan the herds below the terrible sky. Disguised in verdant plumage I swoop. From the jungles around rise exquisite cries, from forests full of ruined tombs. Crisis in the eyes of frightened animals caught in the full floodlights of cantankery old cars from the abandoned estates. Flora, fauna, florid planters, harvests were waving in your baskets. Abundance flowing from your hands. In your eaten eye-sockets the planet was blooming and continents in blossom. Your plantations spread over hillsides and the world spilled over with green thoughts.  Water channelled through the hands of the unfathomable fathers, bodies sleeping in the grey mountain. Thus  schemed a younger world, thus schemed the vegetation. But steel jungles rose in the valleys where the rice-fields dissappeared into the deep sides of the hills into which the ageing trains burrowed like worms leaving traces of their presence on the enormous leaves protesting to the chugging brown river where the laughing women bathed the children and washed the bright clothes where the elephants lolled down the slopes to bathe like huge fruit gold and grey.