A road sign gives the poem its title: a route number, a distance, a destination. Annaba is a port city in northeastern Algeria, and the title reads like a line from a travel notebook, exact and practical. The twelve lines that follow are anything but bureaucratic. Judging by the text, a lone traveler has walked a dry watercourse as far as it goes and is now waiting by a road for a lift east. Nothing more is explained, and the poem's power comes from how much it leaves out.
The grammar is the first thing to notice. Articles and subjects vanish: "wait in a dark / cloak / for ride / east." No one says "I," and nobody asks for "a" ride. The language is telegraphic, like notes jotted down by someone tired, or like the stripped-down speech of travelers who have used up their words. The tenses shift too. "Followed creek upstream" is past, finished business, while "wait" is a bare present that never ends. The phrase "till lost in stones" is deliberately ambiguous. Is it the creek that disappears among the rocks, or the walker who loses the way? The sentence doesn't say, and the doubt hangs over the opening.
The line breaks do the work of waiting. "Wait in a dark" stops before its noun arrives, and then "cloak" sits alone on its own line, as if the poem itself were standing still. "Dark" could be the color of the cloak or the hour of the day. "For ride" and "east" each get a line to themselves, and "east." is the only word in the poem that earns a full stop. It is the single fixed point in a text with almost no punctuation, a direction to lean toward rather than a place to arrive.
Then the poem lifts. "Road goes up in brown hills" is plain and visual, but the next line is startling: "ten thousand men / walk in the gardens of the prophet." The crowd arrives without a source or an explanation. It might be a vision, a memory, a story the traveler has heard, or a procession seen across the hills. Readers who know Algeria is a largely Muslim country may think of Islamic tradition, but the poem never names a prophet or a faith, so any such reading is an inference. What is clear is the contrast between "brown hills" and "gardens," between dust and something green and sacred. The line is also the only one with a full grammatical sentence, with a subject, a verb and a place, as though the vision were more solid than the wait.
The poem snaps back at once with "no cars." The flatness is almost comic, and it shows how easily the practical and the holy sit side by side here. The traveler has ten thousand imagined walkers but not one vehicle.
The last three lines settle into physical detail: "white & black goats in shallow wash / mountains move far away." The ampersand keeps the goats' coloring quick and casual, like a note-taker's shorthand. "Wash" is a dry streambed, and it quietly echoes the creek of the first line, so the poem ends where it began, with water that is mostly absent. Sound holds the poem together in the same understated way. The long *o* runs through "stones," "cloak," "road," "goes" and "goats," a low hum under the clipped lines. Then the vowels open out in "move far away," and the sound itself seems to recede.
That last line is a small puzzle. Mountains do not move, so the movement must be in the watcher's perception. Perhaps a ride has finally come and the landscape is sliding past, or perhaps the traveler, staring at the horizon, feels the distance stretching. The poem gives no period here, leaving the ending open.
What makes the poem worth reading is its restraint. In a dozen short lines it captures a state, being between places and dependent on strangers, and shows how that state can make ordinary ground feel charged with something larger. It trusts the reader to sit in the silence of the roadside and fill it, much as the traveler must.