THE GREAT AND LITTLE WISTERIA

Ninety minutes from Tokyo, in Ashikaga Flower Park, Tochigi prefecture, the Great Wisteria Tree stands poised in her 160 year old glory. There is beauty in that which leaves your mouth agape, and your camera blushing from its inability to capture ethereal magic.

  

Meanwhile, in a quiet Cambridge front porch, the scent of a small vine satisfies.

I stepped outside and buried my nose in the lower hanging wisteria. I let the plump petals bless my forehead, cheeks and just for a moment, thought this, this is what we dream of when times are hard, when beauty is a luxury that almost makes us angry - because others can enjoy what is not ours. When hunger is at the forefront, and food is scarce for us, but others are eating plentifully, voraciously, and also therefore, carelessly, how can we write poetry that is not tinged with steel and scalpel? 

A blackbird is hunting around the daisy adorned grass in front of me. I am standing in the doorway, listening to a chorus of birdsong, knowing that the church bells will ring in less than an hour. It is Friday evening, May has begun and the wider world is roiling away with war, extraction and poverty. 

Tomorrow, when the nurse places a needle in some part of my arm, I will as always think of other humans in less salubrious medical conditions. I will give thanks simultaneously with my silent ‘ouch’ if the needle finds a dry spot, a scarred tissue, a little vein of sorrowful memory. 

“Shaista, there’s a book I think I’d like to re-read,’ says Dad. Saint Francis of Assisi. By Chesterton. Take a look?’ 

‘I’m on it,’ I say. 

And today, it arrives by the magic of mail. 

Scraps of happiness, windows of light, the pattern reveals itself oh so slowly. Mostly we are myopic beings, causing our worst damage when we see but darkly. 

Yitzchak has just been born to Sarah and Abraham in the Old Testament class I attend once a week. ‘He will laugh.’ And soon after, Sarah commands Hagar to flee with Ishmael, to become strangers in a wilderness. I find myself thinking of Zarathustra, the prophet who was born laughing. Lately, I’m trying to understand laughing till we cry and crying turning to laughter. And between them, and around them, the still moving waters of the deep. 

SUMUD صمود

April now… we are in the middle of Passover. Chag Sameach. For some, this is the second Seder without their family members, who were taken hostage during the autumn of 2023. I think about how part of the world is praying everyday for the removal of some people from Gaza for their safety, while others are praying for the continued resistance of Palestinians, to be able to stay in their land, on their land. This particular resistance is known as

صمود

To quote Rabbi Brant Bosen, ‘Those who participate in the Passover Seder are required not only to read the story of the Exodus, but to examine its relevance as the Haggadah instructs us, in every generation.’ Adam from Adama… human from humus… from the soil we arise with soul, and then we are returned to ash and dust, soul returning to… where? I see the atheist’s point of view. If this is all a game, a playful experiment, with God the creator and destroyer, equally, then why engage in a game rigged from the very beginning?

This year finds me drifting in a conscious, thoughtful way, between the Hebrew (new to me) and Arabic letters. Shin, Alif, Lam/Lamed and Meem/Mem…next time, some more letters from Dad’s name… known lovingly as Chotu, he is also of course Mujtaba Tayabali. Tayyib, meaning good… around the Middle East, it’s almost slang for ‘What’s good? All good? All well? Bien? Bené?’ Or more politely, ‘Keef halak, ya tayyib? How are you, O good one?’

Well, it’s not at all tayyib. It’s so far from tayyib. We are all holding on to the scraps of our minds. Scattered Minds is the title of one of Gabor Maté’s earliest books, on ADD - Attention Deficit Disorder - I feel very ADD with the amount of literature I feel I ought to be ‘on top of’, the podcast episodes I have not yet caught up on, even, for the sake of entertainment, the TV dramas and movies I have yet to watch, the music that is passing me by.

Chat GPT helpfully sorts out a version of my life: this is how your life could look, appear the magically typed out words. I pay attention to the orderly structure for a moment, and then I scatter. Meanwhile, in between reading the cricket commentary to Dad, feeding my parents dishes I cook from Hello Fresh recipes, and trying to remember to do at least two surya namaskars a day, I am painting by numbers. Each month, I manage one completed work. Here is April slowly unfolding, one tiny shape at a time…

HAFTSEEN

It’s Navroze today, the 21st of March. Spring equinox. That daffodil time of year. A good Iranian creates a beautiful haft-seen table, as described in this article perfectly. ‘Haft’ is seven in Persian, and the seven objects to be displayed all begin with the Persian letter ‘seen’ … S.

It’s not a big Parsi thing as far as I recall? And not a practise we have ever engaged in as a family, but it does look delightful when done… as would any feast table at iftar, Eid, Diwali, Passover and Christmas… beginnings, middles, ends of years. The seasons are scuttling by faster than ever, humans are humaning so fast that we have already ushered in the dawn of our intelligence companion - dear old Chat GPT, invisible amanuensis, ever ready with a thoughtful answer, memory ever updating. Feeding us and fed by us. An Additional Intelligence. 

I mentioned in a previous post that I had been attending poetry workshops once a week… in January, I began attending a God Fellowship course in tandem with studying the Hebrew Bible with Hadar Cohen, a mystic Arab Jewish scholar, who possesses that rare ability to invite deep spiritual and spirited thought by the quality of her listening. In Hadar’s case, the peace she creates is secondary to the justice and universal liberation she works for.    

Listening is an art we aren’t encouraged to practise. It’s the talkies we like to engage in. Chatters by nature, our opinions have become currency. The radio has been replaced by podcasts and Instagram can be dipped into all day long. I love podcasts. I think I’m subscribed to over one hundred and sixty! I have uncounted tabs open on my various devices, an enormous list of movies/ documentaries to be watched and partially read books glower at me, reproaching their once loyal, now absentee friend.

I like to think I will make a longed for return to reading. I like to think I will attend to my patiently waiting novel. My yoga mats stretch out, hopeful in purple and pink… but… early this morning, a song rang out loud and conspicuous - ‘Pretend you’re happy when you’re blue!’ - and I knew Dad had not slept, was desperate for a cup of tea and company. The sun caught him out the other day, as he soaked up rays in the doorway. He fainted and Mum had a tricky time trying to manage him back to bed, and then, when he still hadn't fully regained consciousness, down to the floor - I was at the hospital having an infusion. The paramedics arrived and were brilliant, but Mum had already wrenched her back by then. Dad’s ok, Mum’s ok … Nat King Cole sets the tone… and I, trying not to cry most of the time, keep quilting the patchwork of my days, a haft seen of its own.

(Images of the Haftseen above are by Pauline Eleazar for Savoir Flair)

(Hadar Cohen can be found at her own website and at Malchut, her Jewish Mystical School)

EVEN MALEFICENT

I hold my face in my two hands,
 and the rest of me falls apart.

So I hold my feet in my two hands,

 and now I am on the floor.

Oh not this again, 

me longing to fly.

Searching for wings, 

 I find torn flesh, 

this too, ripped,

 by two hands.

Nameless men, named men. 

 Even Maleficent 

took lifetimes of loneliness, 

to find her wings again. 

© Shaista Tayabali

at DVerse Poets

image from Allure magazine

ICARUS IN REVERSE

I want to be impressive 

and say I met a mountain once,

or a pyramid, or the desert -

but the truth is the sea scares me 

and the only landscape I know 

lies beneath me; 

my bed. My panicked heart. 

I iron over my panicked heart,

flat as sheets of hair

you can buy these days, and

attach, like a doll’s accessory 

to your own bemused scalp -

whose stories have crossed rivers 

you’ll never know.

Be sure there was sadness there,

you’ll never know.

No one parts with their hair 

when it ripples freely; freedom 

was paid in the sacrifice. Who

pockets the coins of gold

in the temples of our prayers?

The first women who wrote poetry 

were nuns, some say. But the 

first woman was earth, was sea,

was fire flooding air, is still

every tree. I want to be impressive?

Why? Every tiny seed is me.

The sorrow is I forget my wings 

and falling, fail to rescue me. 

(Images: via Lucy Campbell art on instagram After Bruegel, Landscape with the Fall of Icarus (Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts, Brussels)

Participating in DVerse Poets Open Link night 

PALINODE TO FLIGHT

‘New Year met me somewhat sad,

Old year leaves me tired’ - Christina Rossetti

Bird on a wire.

Bird on a tree.

I see you.

Do you see me?

Blink and I’ll miss you.

Squint and you’ll see me.

I, in a taxi, unable to drive.

You, wingèd beastie, fly. 

Fly!

Down among the chimneys,

we burn and kill each other.

Friendly slaughterhouse,

we marry and charm each other.

Trees grow down here, their 

roots our only saving grace.

Mycelium drip feeds our lungs - 

we live, we breathe; sip by sip, 

we make space. 

© Shaista Tayabali, 2025

This, an attempt at a palinode (a song of opposite ideas, or retraction of opinions) is what I wrote in the taxi on the way to the hospital yesterday for an infusion I missed on Sunday. I slept through Sunday’s infusion appointment time, still so fatigued from the weight of last year. 

In this poem, I begin with height and flight, but also shorter staccato lines, and then it takes a turn, a descent, a swoop down into the mire and murk of being human. I try towards the end to invite the idea of space, which is what birds have in abundance, and what we seem to devour with our selves, our industry and our tech. Trees, as always, save us, both reaching down and reaching up. Trees have no need for palinodes. Except when they are on fire… 

(Images : Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 1828-1882)

             DVerse Poets 

TONGLEN AND YUTORI

Have you heard of the Buddhist practise called Tonglen? It's a bodhicitta meditation of taking in dark energy, difficulty or despair and breathing out light, radiating beauty. No simple task! The likes of Zen master Pema Chodron are surely better able to know the size and depth of the darkness your own particular heart can hold before attempting alchemy. But I also think this is a practise most of us do every day in some small way.

It has been a tiring year. It is now three months since Dad went into hospital with sepsis and ear infections that made his life just that bit more challenging. I mean terrifying and confusing. And, in his typical fashion, though terror and confusion, still gracious, grateful, kind and wise. Home now, and a small channel of hearing has returned to one ear. New hearing aids with high tech capabilities must be adapted to. We, I mean us three, and it seems the world beyond, live on an edge much of the time, not fully understanding why. Taking small steps, oh so infinitesimal, to hold on to that tenuous and very human thing we call faith. What is faith? What is the sacred and good in us when the big evidence of who we are points so much to the contrary? 

Have you heard of the Japanese practise of Yutori? It is the art of spaciousness, of the unhurried walk through life (rather than the harried clambering up the ladder, or across the treadmill). Do you have a spaciousness in your life? I have spent my life in houses with many rooms which I fashion into complex worlds, but also am daunted by the gathering of 'stuff'. 'Stuff' can be a treasure trove, and that can be a dangerous slippy sliding ground into a nostalgic hoarding of possessions.

It’s a weird thing to ‘still’ be living with my parents, ‘still’ be stuck in illness, ‘still’ be ‘at home’ rather than… where? Sometimes very famous and influential people say, ‘If I can help one person…’ or ‘If I have made one life better…’ but isn’t this the truth of who we really are? That each of us in our small and vital ways have made one life better, have held faith, kindness and joy, for one other life than our own? At least once a day for a parent, a child. Even, once a week, for a little curly coated dog? Even that seems beyond us sometimes, stretched as we are by historical and present day personal suffering. And still we return, represent, remember, recover. And occasionally, rejoice. So I go on, so you probably do too. I hope we’ll be alright. Times is moving us on regardless, the calendar turns to 2025. Happy New Year? From our Moominvalley to yours, may we remember what is good in each other. 

Images of Fillyjonk, and Moominmamma by Tove Jansson)

MAKING TEA (A SURVIVAL GUIDE TO WAITING)

Like Leila Chatti, I remember

the 6pm brewing of tea

for Dad, for me, 

to get through the long winter evening 

that stretched ahead

into an insomniac night. 

A bridge between two terrors. 

Sometimes it’s the hot water

bottle we are waiting for, 

to take us from shivering, 

back aching paralysis, into

a softer, more pliant acceptance 

that this is it, this is our life.

And this small pocket of heat is love.

For me, it’s dihydrocodeine - 

the friendly morphine coin

the size of a biscuit for a mouse.

Bitter, of course - 

but as miraculous, as soothing

as the hot water bottle,

the hot tea

that frees me,

moves us forward

into the day, counting the hours, 

tasting time in bitter sweet gulps - 

a friendly fire of sorts.

(There are other less pleasant waitings - 

for blindness, for death;

but we won’t speak of those,

just yet.)

© Shaista Tayabali, 2024

For the past two months I have been attending an online poetry workshop facilitated by the poet Trivarna Hariharan. Today is the shortest day of the year in this part of the world. The nights have been drawing in, foggy fingers envelop cars on the dark roads and Christmas lights are a gladdening sign. I wrote my poem using as a prompt the poem below by Leila Chatti - the poet in the very glamorous photo above!)

TEA

Five times a day, I make tea. I do this
because I like the warmth in my hands, like the feeling
of self-directed kindness. I’m not used to it—
warmth and kindness, both—so I create my own
when I can. It’s easy. You just pour
water into a kettle and turn the knob and listen
for the scream. I do this
five times a day. Sometimes, when I’m pleased,
I let out a little sound. A poet noticed this
and it made me feel I might one day
properly be loved. Because no one is here
to love me, I make tea for myself
and leave the radio playing. I must
remind myself I am here, and do so
by noticing myself: my feet are cold
inside my socks, they touch the ground, my stomach
churns, my heart stutters, in my hands I hold
a warmth I make. I come from
a people who pray five times a day
and make tea. I admire the way they do
both. How they drop to the ground
wherever they are. Drop
pine nuts and mint sprigs in a glass.
I think to care for the self
is a kind of prayer. It is a gesture
of devotion toward what is not always beloved
or believed. I do not always believe
in myself, or love myself, I am sure
there are times I am bad or gone
or lying. In another’s mouth, tea often means gossip,
but sometimes means truth. Despite
the trope, in my experience my people do not lie
for pleasure, or when they should,
even when it might be a gesture
of kindness. But they are kind. If you were
to visit, a woman would bring you
a tray of tea. At any time of day.
My people love tea so much
it was once considered a sickness. Their colonizers
tried, as with any joy, to snuff it out. They feared a love
so strong one might sell or kill their other
loves for leaves and sugar. Teaism 
sounds like a kind of faith
I’d buy into, a god I wouldn’t fear. I think now I truly believe
I wouldn’t kill anyone for love,
not even myself—most days
I can barely get out of bed. So I make tea.
I stand at the window while I wait.
My feet are cold and the radio plays its little sounds.
I do the small thing I know how to do
to care for myself. I am trying to notice joy,
which means survive. I do this all day, and then the next.

Author’s Note

This poem was the first I wrote in a long period of drought. I was, as the poem alludes to, suffering from a depressive episode, one that dislodged my language and made the simple tasks of living significantly difficult. There was one act of self-care, however, that I could bring myself to do with regularity: make tea. All day, each day, I did it; it’s true. I made the connection one day between my love of—dependency on, even—tea and the cultural role and history of tea in my Tunisian ancestry. Tea is so beloved in Tunisia that when it was under French rule, colonial administrators believed Tunisians’ tea consumption was a psychological condition, teaism, similar to alcoholism, and that the amount of tea my people drank had poisoned both their bodies and minds. I was interested in examining my own experience with my body and mind, harm and care, pleasure and survival, as it relates to tea, and this poem tumbled out of that. As a note to this note, my pantry continues to be stuffed to the brim with tea—enough to last me over a year, at least.

photo images from Carthage magazine

MESSY BOOTS AND POCKETS OF JOY

Do you recall two movies starring Kate Winslet titled 'Hideous Kinky' and 'Kinky Boots'? The first was based on a memoir by a woman whose mother cobbled together an interesting and beautiful life, off the beaten track. The second... well, it's just an intriguing sounding phrase, isn't it? Less of the hideous or kinky here, but if I were to title my cobbled together story, it would probably be Messy Boots. I mean that literally - I do sometimes forget that this is England and we have cream carpets (well, trying to stay cream) and I walk in after a good hack around the village with Samwise Gamjee, the cockapoo, and track mud here and there. 

But mostly I mean that I live like a messy snail, leaving a trail of stuff in this room and that, where I start projects of creativity or purpose, and then tumble into illness and forget. Later, I return, the good elf to my messy troll, and pick up and tidy and sort. For thirty years, I have shaped a kind of happiness and peace from this little exercise, not so much of control, as of collage, collaboration with my two selves, my several selves.

There's another book I think of now... 'How To Make An American Quilt' by Whitney Otto. The movie starring Winona Ryder and Dr. Maya Angelou, is sweet. It's all very genteel and yet emotionally true to women of any time. Ever since the pandemic made realities virtual, made the impossible possible, we the various disparately located peoples of the world, are now able to come together in a thing called Zoom Rooms... we workshop in the same space and time across geography. So house bound elves like myself, even on troll-like days, can zoom with the likes of Fatima Bhutto, Fatima Farheen Mirza, Trivarna Hariharan and Suleika Jaouad to name a few of the writers and poets I have 'hung out' with. There are writing prompts, and we write together in silence, later sharing what we wrote if we have the courage, or even, for a while, being in silence during an entire reading hour cultivated by Naomi Alderman. 

How do you hand make your life? Do you potter like I do? Are you tidy or messy? Is it childish to be messy and grown up to be tidy, or is it agelessly creative to be messy and openly vulnerable to display that you are not 'together' yet? Do you find, like I do, that there is so much to read and do, and never enough time, but that pockets of joy are in fact found in this mess of everything, everywhere, all at once? I am trying, as always, to cultivate an hour here and there to 'do something', and not be overwhelmed by how very small my doing is. 

GAZA IS A DOOR

Gaza is a door

into two worlds - 

one that keeps us alive,

and one that kills us.

We die, either way,

at the door.

Death is a door

we knock on. And then run

far away from. 

Life is a door 

we can’t remember if we chose

to walk through. 

Meanwhile, the river moves,

a running thing, 

away and towards.

Meanwhile, I,

the other living thing

standing on this bridge, 

autumn leaves in my pocket,

rain on my skin -

the tiniest of windows letting light in.

Artwork : @bypeoni Peonica Fernando

Poem featuring at dverse poets