VERA, AN ANNIVERSARY

A small brown bird flies close to me.
Yesterday, a butterfly -
- white, monarch -
I scent my grandmother near.

She was not a poet
Nor a deep thinker,
But she liked the quiet,

Which was strange
Because she hated to be bored;
And yet she could sit for hours

On balconies, in conservatories,
With only herself for company,
A book, a ticking clock,
And the sky - ever changing, ever the same.

©Shaista Tayabali, 2019
Inspired by Vera, my beloved grandmother who died a few days after my birthday, six years ago... both our anniversaries are coming up as Vera and I were born only two days apart. Many lifetimes but only two days... 

 Participating in DVerse Poets Friendly Call to Open Link night ... 

TREASURE HUNT

It circles round just as fast

and soon you find yourself 

at the end (the seeming end,

really, just another beginning:

another airport, another birthday,

Easter, Christmas, New Year).

And still the feeling 

of leaving something behind,

but tripping ahead anyway;

each day, each month 

a further clue, on this 

treasure hunt we call life.

© Shaista Tayabali, 2019

Arts and Crafts Corners brought me great joy over Christmas... this one a very reminding spot in the house, even after two of my nieces have tripped across the oceans back to school and friends. The children of my life come and go, I visit and leave... but small creations remain as memory).  

Artist Credits: Various Tayabali-Edwards

Poetry Prompt... Dverse
(P.s. what does the Inside Of Your Brain look like?) 

SHAISTA

‘Shaista.

That is a proud name,’ he said.

I am proud of my name.

It is the Rajput name for warriors.

It is the Persian name for poets. 

Am I not then Shaista, the warrior-poet?

I am standing on the battleground,

listing a little,

sword and pen at the ready,

blood and words aplenty.

But I long for sakura,

snow pink petals of my cherry tree.

Oh brief, beautiful one,

wrap yourself around me,

so I can be Shaista, the free.

© Shaista Tayabali, 2018

What does my name mean? My mother always told me it meant courteous and graceful, mostly because she wanted me to be unfailingly polite! But in Pashto, the language of the Afghans, my name means beautiful. An ex-soldier from Afghanistan once commented on my name as we both waited in line at the Apple genius bar! Then my poet friend Kenza assured me it was so... and last week a Pakistani taxi driver, who proceeded to quote couplets by Ghalib (in Pashto) at me.
When I was a child and our class was studying the period of the Mughal empire, and the wars between the Mughals and the Marathas in Indian history, we came across Shaista Khan, the fierce Mughal warrior. So of course my classmates wondered why I had been named after a man!
My own grandfather, though, had never heard of the name; he decided to call me Shy Star after I was born, so he could not fail to  remember the name of his first granddaughter. I use his mnemonic to help people even now, when they struggle to wrap their unfamiliar tongues around my name. 

The illustrations above of Sufi warriors, Sufi dancers, are my own... I've been including them in copies of my poetry collection for friends... I titled the book 'Something Beautiful Travels Far' which I suppose could also read 'Shaista Travels Far'! 

(for 'Poetics: What's in a Name?' a dverse poems prompt) 

BANAZ: A LOVE STORY

They disappear the girls,
But it's the men who blur, for me.

Whose father, did what, when,
With whose aid, why - I care less

About them. And only about you.
You remain. You and your name

Haunt me, but not as ghostly mystery.
There was nothing insubstantial

About you. In fact, there was so much
That it has spilled over, across time,

Crossed the bridges of your world
And mine, so you live with me now,

Swimming in the river of my thoughts.
I hope you don't mind.

(c) Shaista Tayabali, 2018

They wanted us to forget her. They tried to erase her, in a suitcase, strangled and abandoned, buried. No, evil, you did not succeed. We honour her, still. Her name is on our lips, in our poems, crossing borders on the wind. Banaz Mahmod. In 2012, Deeyah Khan and Andrew Smith documented her story in a film they titled Banaz: A Love Story. She was born 16 December 1985, and killed 24 January, 2006. She was Iraqi Kurdish. She lived in Wimbledon, London. And she fought to save her own life.  
(poem shared via dverse poets)

THE BEND IN THE ROAD

We thought it would come quietly,
the final bend in the road;
we shored ourselves up, with
pots of tea, evening crackers
and Sunday nights in Downton Abbey.

Seventy-four years ago,
you walked down the aisle with me;
a pair of jaundiced eyes wouldn't keep
you from marrying me.

Sometimes the morning light
catches the emerald in my ring;
my fingers catch the chords of notes
you liked to hear me play.

Here we are, you and I,
a litte stuck today -
I, tucked up in our bed,
and you, in your room,
many miles away.

But the lamp is on,
and when tomorrow comes,
beside you, I will stay.

I wrote this poem last year for my beloved Mary on John's 95th birthday. These are wrenching times for Mary, because she is separated from John, who is too ill to live at home anymore. Five days after their wedding John left to be with the RAF, but then he came back, and then the children came, and then, and then... life... all of life. And then one day Mary met my father, who was a medical student of John's at Addenbrooke's, the same hospital I now haunt. And then years later she met my mother. More years passed. And then my brothers and I. I was fifteen and my life has been the richer, the more beautiful, the truer for her friendship. Lucky, lucky me. 

linked to dverse poets open night...

ON AGEING

I think I know this:

I could be happy at 80.

Or perhaps 81, 

When I am safely on board. 

This being in my thirties

Is neither here nor there

And waiting for forty 

Is a certain death.

Death to youth. I know this

Because I keep getting told this.

You are not young,

Anymore. They say.

As though I was curious

As to what I was. 

(c) Shaista Tayabali, 2017 

(Poetry prompt for Dverse Open Link Night) 

Today happens to be my friend Sylvia's birthday - one of those 'big 0' numbers that have to be faced down every ten years... Sylvia is a cyclist, a cartographer, a mathematician, a feminist, a gardener, a reader, a thinker - oh also wife, mother and grandmother but really, what has her age to do with anything? Her Sylvia-ness is everything. Sylvia and her delightful husband Colin live in a magnificent five hundred year old farmhouse, and each timber frame is guarded by Old Man Rayner, who watches over my friends with care and looks with equal care, possibly suspicion, at outsiders walking past his giant iron shoulders. 

WHEN THE STORM IS ABOUT TO BREAK

Carl Brandien Hurricane at Tarpon Bend, September 15, 1945

That rumbling rolling
Coming from thunder sound -
The storm is about to break.

Open the window
And the raindrops wet me,
Forehead, cheek and chin -

Look down to write you
Into a poem, and lightning
Flashes beside me.

The puddles are jumping,
The willow sashaying,
And then just as quick, everything stills.

I turn away. Light candles.
Run a bath of lavender
And lily scented froth.

Sometimes you fear it,
Sometimes you don't -
The thunder rolls back for her audience.

(c) Shaista Tayabali, 2017 for Open Night at Dverse Poets 

Edgar Degas Woman in a Bath Sponging her Leg c.1883

THE BUTTERFLY HUNTERS

Butterflies attract butterfly catchers;
Young men with invisible nets
Seek to imprison young women
With the desire to fly.

The ability to escape from such perils
Is an advantage acquired only by time,
(Not wisdom, but experience). Such men
Must be eluded at all costs.

If butterflies must be caught -
And really, why must they? -
Better to do one's own catching.

(c) Shaista Tayabali, 2017

Artwork: Catching Butterflies, French, late 13th century & Berthe Morisot (1841-1895): 'The Butterfly Hunter'.
Poem linked to Dverse Poets for their Open Link Night. 

MAYDAY

I like painting my lips.
Nothing wild like purple,
or unexpected like green;

just your standard, average,
ordinary orange,
herald of summer dreams -

or a plump, pale pink
promise of innocence,
candy floss at Strawberry Fair

when school was out
and love
was ever in the air.

© Shaista Tayabali, 2016

Poetry prompt from dverse Poets Pub...

ABOUT A HORSE

About a Horse

The reins put me off. That direct link to slavery. 

A master designing a halter especially for his slave. Adjustable.

And I think the mare knew this. And sensed I was no leader. 

Or maybe she forgot about me, light-boned girl child on her 

inverted lap. All she heard was the lowing of a distant cow, 

and some nascent memory of her own made her bolt. 

It’s always been this way. I signal weakness.

You don’t need to be human 

to know I am scared of you. 

You can be animal too. 

There were many of us there that day.

But when it was you bolting, and me 

clinging on, my fingers in your mane, my thighs 

gripping your haunches, where did they go? 

Where were you going? 

How did we survive?

The irony was this: we had come to the end of our time 

together. We had had our neat and tidy

trot around the rough red tracks, and now we were gathering 

to part. My brothers had had their gallops (they preferred 

gallops, I did not; you were chosen for your sedate pace)

and I was ready for solid ground

but

I was tied to you: my feet in your stirrups. I was already leaning, 

arms outstretched for the lifting up, over, down

when you decided to run.

How long do horses live? You were a hill station, holiday 

treat horse. You were real; there is a picture of us. 

I was always scared. You were always gentle. 

Until that day. 

I wish I could remember your name. But what then? 

You never knew mine - did you?

Did I call out your name when I begged you to 

stop? You heard nothing, it seemed, only wind,

and whatever was driving you on. Did you hear

me scream, Bachao! Bachao! because I could see 

hill station women, babies wrapped snug, safe 

in their mother’s arms, and I was, you were,

thundering further and further from mine?

It wasn’t my mother who saved me. Or a stranger’s. 

It was you. All I had to do was hold on

until you ran out of fear, and I heard your heartbeats

allargando, adagio, adagissimo. Last week, I thought of you 

during a Beethoven concert, and talked about you 

in the interval, and tried to convey something of our ride 

into nothingness and how everything became clear 

when you finally cantered to a halt.

He found us there, your trainer, but I can’t remember my rescue. 

You were docile by then, chewing wild grass by the verge, 

acting as though nothing had happened,

as though you often ran for your life, and to your 

death: a ritual

you practiced for some final victory.

© Shaista Tayabali, 2015

Entered in dverse poets pub for their Open Link night and will also be published on herstory blog.

WINDFALLS

It's like that
even in autumn
especially in autumn
when you become part of the fall.

You have forgotten to drink
enough water through summer, and now
you mirror the parched, desiccated
leaves that crunch and crumble
beneath the heels of your boots.

You are being pulled back,
taut elastic,
to your roots.

You pass a green tub
full of this year's Bramley windfalls

- leaves fall,
dancing free of your marching feet.

Everything is not dead
when it falls.

I pick up the living,
shaped like hearts,
the plump, yellow, still beating.

I run out of breath
clutching on to the promise
of new shoots awaiting me.

I am gorging on the wind
that feeds me hope.

I am home.

© Shaista Tayabali, 2015

(On my way over to the nieces, three words stop me and start a poem. By the time I am writing the last three words, I am home. This is a love poem to the beat of my own heart, the march of my own feet, the breath that carries me to love.)
Participating in dverse poets and magpie tales poetry prompts.
Images via dverse and magpie. Photo credit: Daniel Murtagh.

THREE POEMS IN THE STYLE OF EMILY DICKINSON

My tacky heart
Beats too fast -
A Plaything
For my rib cage -

I could give it
To You, if You asked
But You
Never do -

***

Love refuses me Nothing.
Every nook
And cranny Fulfilled;

Love refuses me Nothing -
I have only to ask,
And it is Your Will -

That I Be Satisfied.

***

What more can I ask, Beloved?
What more can I say?
For You have heard
every Word -

and shown me
every Way -

© Shaista Tayabali, 2015

The poets over at dverse suggested we write in the style of Emily Dickinson for today's poetry prompt. So I have… but I also feel the need to post a real Emily D poem, one of my favourites -

You cannot put a Fire out -
A Thing that can ignite
Can go, itself, without a Fan -
upon the slowest Night -

You cannot fold a Flood -
And put it in a Drawer -
Because the Winds would find it out -
And tell your Cedar Floor -

(poem 530, c. 1862)

ON MY MOTHER'S PALATE

It begins with my mother. Food always begins
with my mother. It tires me when people ask
if I can cook a curry.
As if all we eat is curry.
As if a country the size of a continent
could ever, only, would ever, only,
feed itself on curry.

I began to hate that word long years
ago. When it boxed my mother in.
When there was never room to explain
she is Parsi. Zoroastrian. A portraitist
describing food on a plate
the way she carves paint onto canvas.
Her palette is sometimes pastel, and
sometimes oil; a mix of ochre (mustard or rai);
coriander for greens: peas, lime, okra, French beans;
purple aubergines.

Eggs for any day, any possible way:
her grandmother (and my grandmother)
both believed in butter.
Generations of Julia Child doppelgangers.
Girlhood was for sali, salty potato matchsticks;
sev mamra, rice puff popping,
chocolate ice cream for Sunday mornings.

Now, on special occasions, or just for love,
hours of building biryani, sifting, sieving daal,
and preparing every roti.
Pomfret if she can find it, lightly fried with salt and pepper.
And on the side, cachumber.
Cachuber? (Here the rare parental disagreement.)
Every birthday garlanded with a carefully burned
white palace of semolina, milk, sugar, petals,
raisins. She calls it rava or ravo, depending.

A small tribe, the Parsis, in a vast civilisation;
in a country swimming in flavour, they make their meals
as moreish as my father's people do. The bedouin
desert tribes still thrum beneath the meat
that hangs off girded steel.
You have to garment your fingers
to really taste your food, and share a single thali
without disturbing the portions.

When I was a boy, he begins, but the memory is too much
for a cold November day in England.
I remember, he tries again, his fingers curling,
savouring mutton as it melts, paya, haleem,
falooda with chiku, thick buffalo cream.
It is May when he speaks, gulmohar season.
In the heat, scarlet tiger claws watch the drip of mango
run down his chin - King Alphonso, the best -
and bursting her stays, sitaphul - Custard Queen of apples.

Quinoa is recommended to the girl with the wolf
disease: mashed avocado, maca, kale, apple cider vinegar.
Cacao helps to sweeten spinach, chia, goji,
but even as I juice and blend, my heart belongs
somewhere else, with someone else's palate.

In her conservatory, she tends bougainvillea and hibiscus,
coaxing Indus valley plants to befriend their cooler companions.
And up from her kitchen, magic weaves her spell.
Food never tastes as well
as when my mother makes it.

(c) Shaista Tayabali
a dverse poetry prompt

FEET OF CLAY

In some part of me I must believe
nothing can be broken.
What else explains this carelessness?

It was the tiniest clay pot
made for seeds and
the tiniest tree.

I am manifesting it whole
in this poem, so it knows
it was loved the way it was

but also the way it is
now, exposed innards,
cracked through.

Someone will put you together,
I tell the flower pot, and myself.
Mostly, I tell myself.

© Shaista Tayabali, 2015

posted for dverse poets, open link night

images of kettle's yard, cambridge

SECRET SCRIBE

Every colour on Turner's palette
walks past the scribe.

I am still, not quiet, in ochre
and my mother's five silver bangles -

but the one I wanted to write about
was the white dupatta

which seemed to float
with a life of its own

waving goodbye.

© Shaista Tayabali, 2015

I found a bench tucked into an arch of pink and white morning glories, and managed to scribe a few secret poems under Bangalore sky. When they say India has beautiful colours, they only say the truth. Today, at the hospital, I was back to the blue walls and shadows, but part of me was still cocooned a thousand miles away.

secret poem prompt via a Hyderabadi dverse poet

SELF-PORTRAIT

First the hair

before it falls,

taffy, black molasses.

Then the skin,

fever-flush pink,

marshmallow cheeks,

(steroid-filled).

Wait, I forgot the eyes,

(I don’t see too well, these days)

obscured by tubes and blebs

and blood.

And then the mouth

that eats poetry

and cake

and spills happiness by the barrel.

The body ballet depends on the day:

sometimes a corpse,

and other times, a salmon

leaping, dolphin hooting

medley.

Slumped on the desk, scribing,

tucked up in bed, scribing,

hooked to the needles,

falling down the manholes,

scribing.

I find my eyes again,

scribing.

There you are,

light.

© Shaista Tayabali, 2014

Took this at the hospital just before one of my many myriad procedures.
This is how I see sometimes. Bit blurry, bit double visiony...

And this is how my mother sees me. Under her hands, I become whole. 

(Another interpretation of a dverse poets prompt…)

MASKE (NIGHT OF THE BLOOD MOON)

I went to the place where the wild things are
last night, on the trail of the blood moon;
I followed stardust and scalpel stones
to the place beside the runes.

I held my palms, out,
for all the readers to see,
to make what they could of the threads that bind me
behind the smudging
     and the tearing
     and the rearranging
of my soul.

The blood moon passed over
I was bathed in blood
I paid in pain of a different sort
from a different source;

from the place where the wild things are
to the place where the unspeakables are
to the place where the silent are
remembering.

© Shaista Tayabali, 2014

Phyllis Galembo, professor of fine art at Albany University in New York, celebrates the ritual of masquerade in her portrait photography from Nigeria, Haiti, Zambia, Sierra Leone, Ghana, Burkina Faso and Benin. The carnival characters are rooted in African religion and spirituality, and among the materials plundered are lizard excrement, sugar syrup, tar, coal dust, leaves, cowry shells, sisal. 
Over at the dverse poets pub, the poets have thrown open the floor to interpretation.
I've been wanting to write something about the blood moon, and passover, so last night, I did… 

SPINE POETRY: THE HIDDEN POETRY OF BOOKS

SOUL MOUNTAIN

Till morning comes
a princess remembers
secrets of the heart -

the bride stripped bare,
the blue flower,
the glass palace,
a city of bells;

Old path, white clouds,
clear light of day -
surprised by joy,
our feet walk the sky;

Only love is real.

(c) Shaista Tayabali

This piece is inspired by a New York artist, Nina Katchadourian, creator of the 'Sorted Books' project - where photographs of clusters of books form an idiosyncratic poetry of sorts... a hidden, spine poetry, revealing something of the reader's tastes, and simultaneously testing the constraints of language and grammar. I was hoping to include a poem in time for National Poetry Day, but I am excusing myself on grounds of an outrageously painful eye. I did have a poem published in time for Volume Magazine though!
Most of my books are in boxes in the garage (I have been living a nomadic life this summer moving from place to place, but I will be settling somewhere 'propah' soon) so a couple are a selection from the general home library as opposed to just my own. 
This poem joins part of the dVerse - Poets Pub where a constellation of poets share their talents, offer advice and challenges... try writing a spine poem with your own library selection :)

I think this one by Samuel Peralta is brilliant...

The Passage

Only the sea keeps

crossing the chasm

Inside the tornado,

gravity,

the conjuror's bird

glimpses

the possible past:

the hundred secret senses,

the gates of exquisite view.

The Lake Isle Fellowship

One of the pleasures of poetry is the way a line returns to you, unexpectedly. There you are, a schoolchild, being forced to learn of a poet's strange intent -

'I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,

And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;

Nine bean rows will I have there' - why? Why will he have nine bean rows? And why wattles? What were wattles to me? But learn the lines I did. And now, as I curl up on a rainy Sunday, and watch the green grass of home slowly soak up the new March rain, as I wait eagerly for spring to unfurl, I understand Yeats...

'And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,

Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;

There midnight's all a-glimmer, and noon a purple glow,

And evening full of the linnet's wings.'

Yeats was in London, longing for Lough Gill, like any exile in a home away from home, like any lover separated from their beloved...

'While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,

I hear it in the deep heart's core.'

I didn't call him consciously to mind, but what Yeats heard all those years ago, echoes now in me as his words resound with each drip-drip dropping of peaceful rain today. Happiness is a funny thing - sometimes it feels just as sudden as unhappiness. And all you can give thanks for is that the path has been trodden before, and with great care, by a fellow poet who understands your dreams.

image by digital artist Walter Smith for dverse

William Butler Yeats by John Singer Sargent, 1908 

CONFIDENCE (An Abstract Theory)

I Write My Face
Upon My Age
In Lines
Of Poetry -

I Right My Wrongs
Up On The Stage
For All The World
To See.

© Shaista Tayabali, 2012
image prompt: red spot II, wassily kandinsky, 1921, magpie tales
poetry prompt: dverse