I am thinking about one roseate evening, in the final month of summer. Near the banks of the Selbi, seen at the eastern edge of Jigjed’s summer pastures, there stood a wooden hovel. Where we were staying, the families of livestock farmers were passing the summer. The poet O Dashbalbar, who was from Sühbaatar aimag, had been writing poems on his own that summer. When he came back from work in the evening, he would lay out on the grass a quilted mat, and lie, face down, to write his poems. And the final rays of the sun on the cows’ tethering line were joined with the blue smoke from a dungfire to create a haze of bluish rouge. A young calf’s mooing, and the cheerful voices of children, rose into the sky. This is the poem which Dashbalbar wrote on this evening:

I am a child of nomadic Mongolia.  We would move at the break of dawn. As a child I used to sit in a basket on the loaded cart, greeting the morning sunshine at the even pace of the plodding camel; perhaps it was then that I felt the rhythm of my future poems. When we reached our new camp, everything – the blue cranes, the small trace of white fog, the cluster of boulders, the variegated hills – would seem new to me.

It is clear that contemporary Mongolian poetry develops along distinctive Mongolian lines but also takes poetic features from the rest of the world. The first Mongolian poet is the people. The song and poetry of the nomadic people are collective creations. The shortest Mongolian verse is the khos uyanga, or the couplet:

Orchlon (Universe)
Gaslan (Sorrow)

The world is summed up in these two words.

To speak about poetry within today’s cognitive frame would be a bit insufficient. With other words, one cannot explain many hidden values of real poetry by means of our understanding of things of today. One of these values is the energy wave of the poetry. The energy wave contained in the poetry is an inexhaustible wealth of the poetry culture of the humankind. Strangely enough, in nomadic cultural heritage one often faces something that resembles efforts to manage natural energy through the energy of poetry. This should be given importance and careful study, I think.