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.
