Poetry
Things to do in Ulaanbaatar
Visit an old Buddhist monastery.
Take a tour of the cashmere factory.
Catch a lecture at the university.
View contemporary art in a gallery.
Toast at the top of the Blue Sky Hotel
th
on the 25 floor; dine there as well.
Bargain at the black market where vendors soft sell
unique handmade items to show and tell.
Listen to throat singing at the town hall show
where traditional dancers leap to and fro
at the sounds of the horsehead fiddle’s low
groans, while acrobats contort in synchro.
Too hot, we took a plane north, not knowing
we’d come back in a squall. It was snowing.
Ulaanbaatar has the lowest mean temperature of any capital in the world. Almost half of
Mongolia’s population lives there.
John Delaney
After retiring as curator of historic maps at Princeton University Library, I moved out to Port Townsend, WA, and have traveled widely, preferring remote, natural settings. Since that transition, I’ve published Waypoints (2017), a collection of place poems, Twenty Questions (2019), a chapbook, Delicate Arch (2022), poems and photographs of national parks and monuments, Galápagos (2023), a collaborative chapbook of my son Andrew’s photographs and my poems, Nile (2024), a chapbook of poems and photographs about Egypt, Filing Order: Sonnets (2025), and CATechisms (2025), poems and photographs about my senior cat.