YA HADI

You are there, somewhere,

someone to someone else.

We saw fireworks, together on the roof,

and though the moon stayed hidden

for a while, she peeped out later,

to join the carpet of stars;

And I, beneath them, and yet above

my curious skin, wishing for a guide, for us, for him -

Ya Hadi! Oh God, I beseech.

What does your God say? he asks me.

I am not lost to myself, even if

I am lost to you. I was looking for you,

but you were long gone, caught

in another’s light. I, alone in the dark,

wait to be found again. Meanwhile,

I hold my own lantern 

down these treacherous stairs. 

© Shaista Tayabali, 2025 (a translation of Ya Hadi, if needed, is The Guide… one of Allah’s 99 attributes)

With thanks to Sanaa Rizvi for calling me back in to share a poem on Open Link Night at DVerse Poets… it has been a few months since I last posted… and Edna St Vincent Millay’s poem ‘Love is not all (Sonnet XXX)’ was too tempting a prompt. Dangerous to share Millay in full - to expose my poor poet self against her masterful skill - but I can’t not share. What a sonnet. 

‘Love is not all: it is not meat nor drink

nor slumber nor a roof against the rain;

Nor yet a floating spar to men that sink

And rise and sink and rise and sink again;

Love can not fill the thickened lung with breath,

Nor clean the blood, nor set the fractured bone;

Yet many a man is making friends with death

Even as I speak, for lack of love alone.

It well may be that in a difficult hour,

Pinned down by pain and moaning for release,

Or nagged by want past resolution’s power,

I might be driven to sell your love for peace,

Or trade the memory of this night for food.

It well may be. I do not think I would.’

ON ST. PATRICK'S DAY, GRIEF AND JOY OBSERVED

I am surrounded by churches in the village where I live. Samwise and I turned right today, and walked down to the church past the railway line. It's a quick decision, and the sun seemed to be calling us thataway. We made a nifty getaway from his nemesis, a tiny dachshund with war on his mind, and made it to the church. Sitting outside on a bench with two crutches propped beside him, was a man eager for a chin wag. He was John, ex police officer, 57 years in England and still in possession of his County Kerry accent. "I'm Catholic,' he said, 'but I believe there's only one God and I come to this church for the peace.' His mobile phone was lying beside him - he'd been trying to get a hold of his sister to wish her a happy St. Patrick's Day. I asked him to explain the origins of the day, and we both commiserated over the tragedy befalling Ukraine.

Two days ago, I was approaching the other church (Sammy and I had turned left this time), and I saw a man praying his namaz on a prayer mat on the tiny triangle of green outside the church. He had stopped his car, and was observing the evening prayer. I couldn't believe it! At this very church, twenty-nine years ago, my father had been pointedly informed by the choice of words in the sermon that he would only be welcome if he converted from his unwelcome religion. And now, the namaz. I wanted to applaud the man for his... courage? Defiance? Simple observation of prayer? I wasn't sure. So I dawdled with Sammy until the man rolled up his mat, and I waved in a friendly fashion at the companion in his car. They waved back. And onwards we all went. If only it could always be this way.  

Grief, Observed

 

‘The act of living is different all through. Her absence is like the sky, spread over everything.’

 

I settle into the graveyard with C.S. Lewis,

observing grief together.

 

All my childhood I was accused

of being too sensitive. 

And make no mistake, 

it is an accusation.

 

No one ever declares it worthy of praise. 

Not in a girl.

For how will she cook and clean and submit easily,

if her mind dissects and discerns?

 

When they say too sensitive,

they mean too knowing. 

 

It’s a Sunday and the church doors are open. 

I walk into the incense. 

Mary greets me, I like to think, 

and Jesus invites me closer. 

 

I approach. And see the candle tree, 

electric lighter awaiting me.

 

Every night we light a divo, my mother and I, 

keeping going the Zoroastrian fire. 

Here, the lights are blood red, not white. 

I place one like a star atop the pyramid wire.

 

I recite, out loud, a gatha and a surah,

binding myself to as many of the prophets 

as will have me. Come now rain! 

Come now thunder!

 

Why do I fear? The fire 

tree protects me. 

© Shaista Tayabali, 2022 (linked to this evening's dVerse Poetry)

To end in hope then, with news of another mother and daughter, Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe and her daughter Gabriella, finally united in freedom, back in England, thanks to the determined, relentless efforts of her husband Richard. A long road ahead, of course, but a little corner of peace begun.

 

WINTERING

'A surprising cluster of novels and fairy tales are set in the snow. Our knowledge of winter is a fragment of  childhood, almost innate. All the careful preparations that animals make to endure the cold, foodless months, hibernation and migration, deciduous trees dropping leaves. This is no accident. The changes that take place in winter are a kind of alchemy, an enchantment performed by ordinary creatures to survive. Dormice laying on fat to hibernate, swallows navigating to South Africa, trees blazing out the final weeks of autumn. 

It is all very well to survive the abundant months of spring and summer, but in winter we witness the full glory of nature's flourishing in lean times. Plants and animals don't fight the winter. They don't pretend it's not happening and attempt to carry on living the same lives they lived in summer. They prepare. They adapt. They perform extraordinary acts of metamorphosis to get them through. Wintering is a time of withdrawing from the world, maximising scant resources, carrying out acts of brutal efficiency and vanishing from sight, but that's where the transformation occurs. 

Winter is not the death of the life cycle but its crucible. It's a time for reflection and recuperation, for slow replenishment, for putting your house in order. Doing these deeply unfashionable things - slowing down, letting your spare time expand, getting enough sleep, resting - is a radical act now, but it is essential.' - Katherine May, 'Wintering'

I listen to a lot of podcasts, and one of the most gentle, meditative podcasts is 'On Being' by Krista Tippet, who believed many years ago, that despite a staunch move towards atheism, plenty of folk are connected to spiritual beliefs, religious or otherwise. Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks, who died a few months ago, was a wonderful listen. Katherine May read from her latest book 'Wintering', and I found it of great comfort that my recent hibernating ways would not alarm a bear. To a human, sleeping through the morning and well into the afternoon would seem a waste, and perhaps even ring alarm bells of depression or an internal organ in trouble. I want to believe that I will come around to earlier waking and light filled days as spring and summer arrive. For now, I want only to sleep when I can, as much as I can. Sleeping through light does mean I have missed the heady photography options for yesterday's snow day, so I have filched (with permission) my friend Colette's morning photo shoot. Meanwhile, this evening I will stretch into a yoga class (bears stretch too - he wasn't called Yogi Bear for nothin') and later I will toast my parents' wedding anniversary. There's a candle of warmth to enjoy - love that endures, by wintering through. 

All photographs by Colette Barrere, except the last one, which was taken by Chris Boland

GUEST POST : IN THE LAND OF TORIA

While I was in hospital, my friend Victoria sent me photographs of her garden. There are gardens in my hospital, one in particular that I claim as my favourite, but while in a shared ward or private bay, there is no green to be found. Blue and cream aplenty but no living, moving green. So I thought I would share Victoria’s photos with you, with her permission, so you can see what cheered me...

Of course there are other ways to escape while in hospital. My new friend Mary, with the wandering mind, was not in Addenbrooke’s at all... she was in Selby in Yorkshire, and sometimes in the mining and weaving towns of her youth... sometimes she would give me directions to the cemetery nearby and sometimes she accepted that I was not real, I was a visiting spirit to whom mundane things of the mortal world would be of little interest. ‘How long have you been here, like this?’ Mary asked, her hand fluttering, indicating my other worldliness ... ‘Oh, I come and go,’ I answered. We spoke exactly the same language, Mary and I, both of us being of this world and not of this world. It’s all very mysterious, we both agreed.

When I was finally discharged I said goodbye to all my ward mates except Mary. I couldn’t bring myself to utter the finality. Mary had said I would return to her mind from time to time, and I told her I would never forget her. Mary Longbottom of Selby, Yorkshire. So why say goodbye?

(All photographs, except the last, by Victoria Kingsley-Pallant)

WHEN BIRDS COME TO CALL

A broken bird feeder found its way to me last year.

I painted it in shades of country cream.

I filled a cup of water, and sprinkled a meal, 

fit, I thought, for any feathered queen.

No bird came. Months passed by,

and today, hurrah, a visit made.

Bib of blue, and frankly suspicious, she flitted 

and flirted, from lilac to magnolia, 

to her new wooden house,

unconscious of my joyful gaze.

Chaffinch and sparrow followed, drinking in the rain,

picking through the catkin carpet,

the willow leaves, 

the tall, unwieldy, unmowed grass. 

Meanwhile, the news. Meanwhile, the roll call of names 

we never knew, strangers perching gently on our hearts. 

You ask me if I believe in God.

I say, What is God? What is a poem? 

I say, I lost my friends one by one to time, 

but when the birds came to call,

I found I had lost not one of my friends, 

not one of them at all. 

© Shaista Tayabali, 2020

Today, May 14th, was the birthday of both my Uncle Motu and my Aunty Saida. They weren’t twins. Aunty was five years older. They loved us kids equally. Growing up, we were showered with love when they visited our Bombay home, which had been their childhood home, and then when we moved to our shared new homeland of England, love continued, unperturbed by changed geographical boundaries. They are both gone now, into the other world ... but the memory of love remains.

(participating in Open Link Night for Dverse Poets)

THE MYSTERY OF THE ORIGIN OF SEPSIS

Four days in a blue box and then suddenly, huge windows overlooking fields of gold, a giant chessboard and the brief sounds of children playing.

I have been admitted again. For the third time this year - and the manyth fever spike. The Mystery of the Origin of Sepsis continues to baffle. Is it Infection or is it The Lupus? The awful perennial question. For the doctors it is a problem that must be solved to avoid over treatment. For me, although I have an equally honed detective instinct, the clues all occur in the same body. The same mind must control the same fears and maintain a ninja like balance.

In the blue box with no windows - let us call it MDU or Medical Decisions Unit - lives Rosie. Rosie's husband Dave was brought into hospital and since he is her carer, Rosie was admitted at the same time. For much of each day and each night, Rosie keeps her coat on and her handbag tucked neatly into the crook of her elbow, ready to leave. Not a word in her strings of sentences makes relevant sense, but must surely make perfect sense in the world she inhabits all by herself. T'was quite alarming having Rosie peer round my curtains like a friendly bat looking for her mate. It was only on the last night when another patient with dementia arrived, one with a particularly nasty tongue, that Rosie's comparative sweetness shone through. A lost little bat, in the entirely wrong cave.

And then I was wheeled away to be transferred here to Hepatology. I waved royally to my fellow inmates as Greg The Porter deftly manoeuvred my bed past them - you lucky duck, said Brenda, turning green, thinking I was heading home (although how I could leave, bed et al...). It was my opposite neighbour's 78th birthday and she was teary hugging me goodbye. We make friends fast in the blue boxes...

Margaret wasn't allowed flowers in MDU, not even birthday roses... but here in Hepatology, my cousin Imran, dressed in an excellently cut suit jacket, brought me Chicky Chocky Speckled Eggs and a delicate bouquet of pink and white posies. They'll have to wrestle the posies away from me...

BRIDGE OF BALI OLD, BALI NEW

It's the difference between silence and sound. 

Just outside the bathroom a farm, with crowing roosters fluffing dust and gravel off their tails. The villa is harmonious with both breeze and screeching gecko. I hear each crackle and rustle as the rooster places his claw, regal even in this clump of fallen twig and dead leaf. 

The villa is silent of human sound. The other nine occupants have left on various adventures - water park, shopping excursions - I, lone wolf, among the ants and my words. 

I have been to Bali before; two years ago, in a villa like this, but with a koi fish pond and the beginnings of a raw grief. The rain gods began kicking up a storm from the moment we arrived. One night found me huddled on the cold bathroom floor, wishing away my barren life, wishing instead for a fertile womb, a baby. I wrote something that night:

34

Nothing bold. Perhaps the saddest year.

Certainly the loneliest. 

A storm outside does nothing to console me

inside, on the floor of a bathroom in Bali.

You will get everything you wish for.

Even sadness. Especially sadness.

That is the curse.

That is the price.

You would have been willing 

to pay anything (you thought).

Anything, but that. 

But that was then. And I am here now, a different self in the same place. The raw grief that haunted me has dissipated. I feel lighter. Not accepting, exactly, rather adjusting to each new discovery of a life less travelled in some ways, deeply traversed in other ways. All that matters is that I am here, now, surviving the wild heat and submitting to what will come.

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)

THE ART OF ASKING (Book Review)

I have just returned from a week in the Algarve, Portugal - I am slightly woozy with exhaustion and the particular effects of intense sun on a lupus body. I feel parched and floaty at the same time; also satisfied and enriched with love and learning. It was a family holiday. Our first grown-up sibling holiday, with four children. It was hectic. And as with all the best holidays, I had a book to retire with, to curl inside, every night.

The Art of Asking is relevant to all of us, artists and non-artists (if any of us are non-artists, which I suspect we aren't - everyone makes art and beauty somehow, in some way) because we are all afraid of rejection, of being turned down, or most poignantly, because we simply don't know or can't imagine what we can ask for. We want, but we don't know how to ask for it, whom to ask, where to look for help. In my life, dependent as I am on so many people for love and support, worrying about how I will finance myself in some future universe where I am alone and hoping The Books will manifest themselves, I am learning to ask. To be unafraid. To Take The Donuts. Palmer tells us of the recent literary anecdote that has 'rocked' the lovers of Henry David Thoreau - the magic of Walden has been dimmed for some because of the discovery that Thoreau was not quite as alone and self-sufficient as his book implies. On Sundays, his mother and sister brought him a  basket of freshly baked goods, including doughnuts. He took the donuts (American word, American spelling).

Take the Donuts, Palmer pleads with her readers. Take the help. Ask for the help. And then watch the dots connect themselves in your life. Watch the net of loyalty, trust, compassion, understanding, love, tighten. We need each other. Especially when we think we don't. Especially when we are writers, and the expectation of our imaginary audience is that The Book will simply write itself while we are on an island, locked away in a shed or disconnected from the pulse of human chaos. Artists need help: food, shelter, money, hugs, perspective, inspiration, friends. Asking for help is part of the art. Offering the help is part of the art. One cannot exist without the other.

I love this book, but if it's not your thing, here is the book condensed into a thirteen minute TED talk that rightfully went viral...

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Amanda Palmer: The art of asking

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i

HANAFUBUKI

I rarely cry, because I cried so much in the early years post diagnosis of this and that. But yesterday at the hospital the gentle kindness in a friend's 'how are you?' sent me to the tissues. I've been having a rotten time with the disease acting up, which always makes my world narrow, my fears bloom. Meanwhile April is coming to an end and our cherry tree has stretched from white glory to a brown study. 

Angelina (my sister) had some friends over for tea, and their daughter, quiet as a mouse in the house, blossomed into a mixture of Ariel and Puck under the cherry tree. Painstakingly, she gathered individual sakura, collected them into her hat and then poured them over our heads. 'If only,' she mused, 'the petals could fall all at once!' I have since learned this is exactly what happens in Japan after the hanami festival: the sakura falls thick and fast and the word for this is hanafubuki. 

After hospital, coming home to little girls who hand me petals and feathers, is a delight…

I like the floophing, flumping feel of sakura. And so do my nieces who carry the fallen delicates across to me and fix them in my hair. Today I feel more alive than yesterday. Everything that was not good yesterday is better today. Angelina whipped up some baking magic and delivered apple roses to my door even though she is sick with the streaming cold that has beset the twins. I am being kept at arms' length for my own sake.

With that special evening light streaming in this evening, my nose dusted with icing sugar (a hanafubuki of the baking kind), I feel hopeful again. And so it swings. Apparently this is what creative types do. But even in my despair and even in my hope, I am aware of the stories round the globe, and since there is little I can do, for now I shall try to keep up morale. Blow down cherry blossom if you must, I am standing in the sun.

IT WILL PASS, WHATEVER IT IS

'This too shall pass',

my grandmother said,

over and over to me - 

There was always something

that needed comforting

in me.

Yesterday I glanced up

to find a hospital plaque

talking to me - 

'It will pass, whatever it is',

it said, and time looped back

to watch over me.

 © shaista, 2013

Today is the day the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons. Today is also the 87th birthday of Vietnamese Zen monk and peace embodiment Thich Nhat Hanh. Martin Luther King Jr. strived to put forward Nhat Hanh's name for the Nobel prize in the 60's but time has moved far along from the Vietnam War, and the monk moves in much quieter waters now. 

Without his teachings in my life, my own peace struggle with pain, fear and anxiety would be a sad and terrible failure. The greatest of the lessons has been the simplest - to stay present and if fearlessness is available in the present moment, revel in it, trust it, be grateful for it. It passes. The gratitude and the pain. The fear and the remedy. It passes, whatever it is. For days I had stitches that had worked themselves into such positions that I could neither sleep nor breathe without the constant scratch scratch against the soft inner linings of my eye. I wrote to the surgeon with hope, and two days ago he kindly saw me, plucked out the offending irritants and trimmed others he saw might irritate me in time. Purple stitches they were, caught just in time - he was leaving for China that night to perform complex surgery on a train. Lucky travelling patients, lucky me. Perhaps they don't need prizes and awards, the heroes of our world. They just need to exist. And practice.

images: The Mag

Palestine Rose

Teasips

The Ministry of Magic

I did. I read every one of the Harry Potter adventures. I cried and laughed, and did every thing you are supposed to do when you believe. Faith, when it is being written by a skilled author, requires only that you keep reading.
Perhaps it is exactly that simple with life.

In the summer of 2008, J.K. Rowling gave a commencement address for Harvard's graduates, in which she revealed the real secret to success: her speech was entitled 'The Fringe Benefits of Failure'. It is not just her books, but the author herself, who inspires faith.

Recently I learnt of two people who, for various reasons, came to a point in their life when they could no longer read fiction. They just could not believe in the story. The made-upness of it all. And, lately, the same shadow has been casting its grouchy little net over me. I cannot remember the last story I read, all the way through, with belief. The news is too real. The ready streaming tweets and updates and instant global imagery is a too powerful reminder of our extraordinary desire for awareness and our equal helplessness.

I want to know the truth, the true state of things. And I want magic, equally. I want an elder wand for invincibility, an invisibility cloak for crossing borders safely and a healing stone of resurrection from pain and suffering.

Then again, maybe I have them all. Maybe this life of mine is magic, just as it is. We come to our own rescue, don't we? Onwards, Shaista Potter!!

friendship...where magic really begins...

Optimism: A Story in Six Words

Young patient: one eyed. Flirting wildly.

Recently, Paulo Coelho challenged his blog readers to write a story in six words - uma historia em 6 palavras - in the spirit of Hemingway, who once wrote: 

'For sale: baby shoes. Never worn.'  

Hemingway called it his best work. Within 35 minutes of the challenge, Coelho had over 350 six word stories. I found it quite difficult! Do you?

But today, at the eye clinic, I saw a young man with his pretty beloved; he was clearly fresh from an accident or some other trauma, bursting with confidence and the ability to flirt passionately with his amour! It was sweet and real, and very inspiring. 

(There was another story - a patient so thrilled with his own existentialism and spiralling darkness of thought, that he found my smiles positively loathsome! And the more he thunder clouded, the more I radiated joie de vivre and bonhomie. Oh dear. Poor man. When I could not endure the rant any longer, I told him to read Thich Nhat Hanh and Victor E. Frankl and scuttled off.)

It was a long day, and I want to thank you for your lovely words of support, encouragement and advice. Optimism is the way - even if the sheep farmer from Hertfordshire may never agree...

Image: Madeleine Calaido Weber 'Flower in Love'