THE YEAR OF YES

I originally wrote this poem in response to turning down the opportunity to join my mother and her darling friend Victoria for a walk. I was tired. Maybe I’d recently had Rituximab. I sat in the doorway instead, waving off my friends. And soon found myself writing a poem about how I regretted saying no! These days, Victoria is the one unable to go for long walks among crunchy leaves, and the inevitable bump into a friendly soul for a catch up. Village life occurs in the entwined casual conversations that spring up on summer or autumn walks…and hospital life puts an end to those. It is a winter of sorts, a wintering of a life well lived.

                               I wish I had said Yes!

                                          beloved,

                      When you asked me out to walk

among the leaves,

the turning leaves, 

You were offering me

the sound of dreams,

And I turned you down, politely.

Not today, I smiled.

Perhaps, maybe, tomorrow?

But I wish I had said Yes!

beloved,

I wish we had shared this light.

Next time, don't ask.

Just take me!

Order me to dress!

I am going to need your help,

beloved,

To begin the Year of Yes.

 

GLOBAL EARTH HOLDERS’ RETREAT (PLUM VILLAGE)

I made it to Plum Village two years ago in early June for the 40th anniversary of Plum Village. Covid was spreading like a gossipy cliché and the nuns asked me to toddle off home because my complex auto-immunity would be a deeply troublesome obstacle to overcome for the sangha. I had no desire to tangle with French medics in limited French, all on my own, with no beloved Dr Dinakantha Kumararatne to be my local hero. So I toddled. And the twins were delighted to see my masked mouth and smiling eyes when they looked up from their lunch. Last year was a time of grieving with the return of Thây's ashes to his hermitage, but this time I felt his absence more keenly. He has many continuations, myself being one of them, but there will only ever be one Thich Nhat Hanh as he was.

The retreat was intense - the schedule more packed than ever to accommodate a second branch of practise - the global earth holders' community - and as you can imagine, there was a lot of emotion and anger and frustration at the lack of 'global' interest and concern in our shared planet, plants, animals and the welfare of each other. And also a lot of white privilege. or simply the privilege of having time and money to spend at a retreat deepening one's practise in gratitude, care and better communication. Plum Village is invariably a place of healing, but healing takes time, energy and wisdom. Most of us aren't particularly wise, yet. I think I make a difference to some lives when I travel, so I make the effort. A tribal elder told me he had a message for me from the ancestors - I must pay attention to the stories I tell myself. I am writing my own story, he told me. I believe him, in part. But I also believe that a writer feels the responsibility of being the medium through which many stories are told, past, present and hints of what may come to be. We are not new here. We have walked these paths and ways a thousand, thousand times before. The poet exists as reminder. As tolling bell, sometimes. And so she is ostracised as much as she is celebrated.  

I had fun too - morning tea and sticky rice lunch with the young nuns I have been teaching through the pandemic, an escape with friends to the local town for pizza and decompressed chatter, an extraordinary coincidental coffee and croissant meet up with my pal Freya, daughter of Mum's bestie Victoria - to whom I dedicated my poem 'The Year of Yes'. I hadn't seen Freya since before Christmas - so it was a joyful fascination that our paths crossed - hers cycling, mine meditating - at, of all places, Thénac, Aquitane, France. It would have made Thây smile. The most smiling part of the retreat was my new born friendship with Benedetta, my roomie, who read my poetry books cover to cover, and made me feel every inch The Poet. To this day, Benedetta’s wisdom and gentle ways stay with me, and she has visited us in Cambridge. Perhaps I will post separately the poem I wrote her inspired by a rather persistent and dramatic Toad!! 

 

BÁC PHUOC, BEGINNING ANEW

The chapel hasn’t changed much since its last refurbishment. Since my first visit to give thanks in 2009, for surviving the worst and longest of my hospital admissions. 

Usually a quiet spot, quiet enough to hear the hopeful weight of a thousand prayers, today there were two gentlemen on their mobile phones, one in heated exchange with his caller. Three Muslims observed their afternoon namaaz and one man walked straight up to the altar, and communed with his rosary. Is a Buddhist noticeable in prayer? If a Buddhist were to perform prostrations, they would appear no different to a Muslim. A Christian counting rosary beads appears no different to a Hindu with his mala. 

There were no women in the chapel today. Normally that would give me pause, but I wanted to sit somewhere and think about my friend Dr Hong Phuoc Ho. We were always in dialogue from the moment we met in late 2005... we were forced into a sort of silence by the ferocity of his last years with Parkinson’s. And even with the profound physical challenges it brought to his muscle control, Dr Ho still sang a few lyrics when Dad commanded him to this summer, and during our last call, he tried to tell me he had dreamed of me ... but the details I will never know. 

When the news came on Wednesday night, a heavy stone landed on my heart. Grief can be instantly physical. I cried and cried. The next morning I dreamed of rocks falling, threatening to crush the person below. To crush me. Dr Ho had suffered in the prison of his body, and in the prison of his memories of the Vietnam war; in the dream I was afraid of the damage those rocks could inflict, but there was no pain. And I woke up. 

What I do have to hold are all the memories of sixteen years - and the hopeful joy of a friend appearing suddenly in the middle of your life, to challenge and to enhance, to delight and engage the deepest and truest parts of our lives. 

Being in Addenbrooke’s the day after his passing in that very hospital allowed me not only time in the chapel, but also communion with the art on the corridor walls - this is one of the coolest images and will now remind me of Dr Ho - fierce and playful, suffering and equal to the task. 

For some reason, the art up at Addenbrooke's no longer has the name of the artists attached to the art. Perhaps this is a Covid change. I shall update when and if the artists' names are included again. The central piece of the young Vietnamese boy is a silk painting titled 'Fight Till The End' by Cố Tấn Long Châu. Báo Ảnh Việt Nam, 1967.

THE FINAL RESTING PLACE

After many bends in the road, some looked for, some hated (war), some simply endured, we laid our beloved Mary to rest beside her husband John in St Mary's Church, down the road from where Mary and John spent most of their married life. 

Mary was born June 11, 1916 and died on the 15th of December, 2020, and I have been not at all impatient to say formal goodbyes. I liked pretending that Mary had gone quiet in the room next door, quiet but for her piano, fingers practising her favourite pieces of Beethoven or reading Barbara Pym, her always comfort read. When I'd ask Mary what she was reading, she'd sometimes say, 'Oh it's not for you. It's too old-fashioned.' But occasionally she would want to share the 'not for me' books anyway, and my collection now includes some of her favourites from Kathleen Raine to Gervase Phinn.

In the end, there was nothing formal about it, and nor was there any goodbye. Just four poems, among them this one by me, a blackbird singing, and school children laughing next door. The trill of birds, the peals of laughter and her parents’ shared gravestone watching over a marriage blessed, in life and death.

Mary's hands. Mary's voice on the telephone. Mary saying 'darling' or even just my name, 'Oh Shaista...' These I hope never to forget. May I recall them a hundred years from now. 

MARY, MY LIGHTHOUSE

It is the winter solstice today. The shortest day of the year and also the special meeting after 800 years between Jupiter and Saturn. An astronomical event. I used to write almost immediately when a thing happened. An important, moving thing. A change to my story. Lately, I write less here. Lately, I let the waves wash over, and I go under, go quiet. 

On the 15th of December, a Tuesday, in the morning, my beloved friend, Mary Haybittle, died. See that last word? I never wanted to write that word. It still doesn't look right, or feel right. I feel heavy at the stopping point of that word. All the comforting clichés of continuation have not arrived at my doorstep yet. Mary instructed us not to be too sad. She wouldn't be far. She would be perched on our shoulder. Perhaps I need to let go of the heaviness before I can feel the lightness of that perch.

When her husband John died, three years ago, Dad began phoning Mary every single day. Occasionally, like when he fell and was operated on, the phonecalls temporarily ceased. But then, soon enough, the daily ritual would be picked up, and since Dad always used the speakerphone, Mary's voice filled our house. 'Lovely to hear from you, Chotu' and 'I've been so lucky. All my life, so lucky.' So lucky is what I have been. I was fifteen when I met Mary. I inherited her from Dad, who was already a soulmate of Mary's. I, more than sixty years her junior, knew in an instant that I had found my soulmate, too. And soulmate she stayed, decade after decade, until I almost began to believe Mary would be, forever. 

She was the one I needed when tears would gather at the base of my throat, when a storm threatened to capsize my little world. As a teenager then or as an aunt, now. Mary to the rescue, always, always. Once, as Mum likes to recall, I was very distressed and desperate for Mary after just coming home from hospital. It was 9pm, and only Mary would do. My mother, embarrassed, but too loving to argue with a sick daughter, rang Mary, and Mary came. 

On Saturday, I attended a lecture on Virginia Woolf by the artist, Kabe Wilson. 'To The Lighthouse' was Mary's first Woolfian gift to me at fifteen. Our handwritten or emailed letters to each other ran along Woolfian lines of stream of consciousness... her ellipses mirroring mine... And all through the years we marvelled at how 'that Bloomsbury lot' managed to enthral us, decades after their heyday. I, living in Cambridge, would have written to her about Kabe Wilson, sitting by the sea at eighteen, reading 'The Waves', and she would have been intrigued. And she, living in Chichester, by the sea, wrote to me of the waves, which I never see, hemmed in by the fens as I am. 

104 is a respectable age to leave the ones who love you, for being you, because you are special every day. But it isn't as though I had Mary for a hundred and four years, I think, still dissatisfied in the most childlike way. Perch on my shoulder, Mary. Never leave me, Mary. Come back, come back. This greedy child will wait.

(Paintings by Kabe Wilson and Clare Bowen)

CLIVE JAMES: NOTES FROM THE MARGINS OF A BLUE WARD

It would have been Clive James’s eighty-first birthday today. 

Lots of people have October birthdays; friends of mine, a goddaughter of mine. But the birthday of a friend you can never meet again, a friend who also, now, has a death day, imbues the month with even more autumnal poignancy than usual. 

 

He was, after all, the one who went viral with his Japanese maple leaf farewell. The death of the tree preceding his own was just the sort of joke the kid from Kogarah lived for. In his absence, it is harder to find the jokes, here, on the ward we shared. 

Clive’s yawns were leonine. He turned the infusion bay into his drawing room by holding no measure of that sound in discretion. He always fell asleep at a certain point during the drip of immunoglobulins into his vein, something I have never been able to do in my ten years of intravenous therapies. Aside from his genuine sleeps, the famous critic was also able to drop into utterly phoney narcoleptic faints when approached by an undesirable fan. One eager gentleman in particular acted extraordinarily upon Clive’s ability to stay conscious in the face of a bore. Poor dude, I tried to think, the milk of my human kindness attempting to overcome the bald truth: the gentleman in question really is an unstoppable torrent of opinion. 

There are many lonely people shepherded by ill fate into this place. Clive was not a philanthropist.

 

Sometimes, in his eagerness to skedaddle home, Clive would forget some portion of his garments. His cardigan. A scarf. But also, his slippers. Shuffling off in his socks, I ahoyed him back. (His drawing room, remember.) I was as unimpressed by his fashion as he was entertained by mine. His was sixties French philosopher, black, with crumbs. Mine was, is, anything to brighten the spirit. My soft, olive green beret had been eyed covetously so many times, that when the latest carcinoma had been shelled out of his skull, I offered it up. He swiped it without a hesitant beat. Goodbye, beret. I miss you, still.

It is only the start of autumn, mizzling days. The fire of joy is yet to come. We are seven months into a pandemic some of us are better suited to. (To or for? Clive would know.) My rabbit warren between home and Addenbrooke’s is traversed less because those three weekly infusions Clive and I shared are now weekly subcutaneous injections I attend to in my own home. Occasionally, I sit out in the garden, but the bees investigate the sticky serum too closely and drive me back indoors. No sub cut for Clive. No surgical masks or social distancing from his beloved granddaughter. No, just the freedom of a poet unbound. 

 

We were always joking about the spectre. And then one of us would look seriously at the other. Don’t die, said the look. The trouble is, I believed him when his look promised he wouldn’t. Or when he wrote, ‘my infusions have been stopped temporarily, hence my absence from class’ or, ‘I’ve had an op and it went quite well, so I’m coming alert again.’ 

Think about death all you like. It doesn’t help you prepare. Not really. Every poem is a brushstroke, feathering death away. Does it come mightily or lightly? Neither, I think, for Clive. Eighty he may have been in grown up years, but when it came, surely it cradled him softly, like the hug of a tree. No more thorns. The bark didn’t bite. He left the fire for us, and a deep impression in the blue vinyl armchairs, of joy.

All images via The Guardian website article 'Clive James: A Life in Pictures'

BIRTHDAY IN BADGER’S WOOD

It rained all day today. It has been raining most days this week. No walks for Dad. There’s a giant puddle in the pavement outside our house where our next door neighbours’ twin girls jump... where other children, unknown, wrapped in rain jackets, pause, position their boots carefully, and then jump! jump! jump!

A week ago, it was my birthday, and while I was still sleeping, Mum garlanded the front door, the dining room door, and one extra garland in readiness for my neck when I awoke; she hung birthday banners, geranium leaves and hibiscus everywhere that I might see and rejoice in being loved. I felt so loved and content that when it turned midnight, I wanted the day all over again. From seeing the Singaporean siblings off to school on their bus, to opening presents sent by the Malaysian twins, a bread maker sent by my brother, cards from afar, and talking to my childhood friend Fudge and her daughter in Bombay about dogs and drawings and fairy lights.  

I floated around all day, baked a Victoria sponge cake that evening and then, the next morning, when Joseph aka Badger, arrived to pick us up, bundled myself into a warm cosy blanket, mask on, and off we went, like the three bears, to Badger’s Wood. This was Dad’s first outing since his fall almost a year ago, and although he managed a goodish walk into the wood, he had a near turn in the heat - so I hustled back for water and Badger ran back for a chair and we all collapsed, while Dad recuperated in a kingly fashion, among the birch and blackberry bramble. 

Yesterday, during my respiratory consultation at the hospital, I shared the secret to surviving my new form of home therapy by subcutaneous injection - Colette and I FaceTime. Tuesdays at Two. We are each other’s video girls, smiling, laughing, commiserating and listening, each to the other, as we move forward in this strange pandemic, made stranger by the needles and tubes we administer in the casual atmosphere of home. The three medics present and the nurse who had trained us were all intrigued, impressed and hoping to present our buddy system at the upcoming European Immunology Delegation as an idea for all new patients and perhaps even the veterans - to help cope with pandemic isolation and the claustrophobia of an unshared trauma. It helps to have a friend-mirror. Coco and I have known each other for years, hence the trust in visiting Badger’s Wood at all. We didn’t hug, much as we wanted to, but just being near, sharing stories and warmth and courage, was enough. Clive would have hated home injections. Claerwen, his daughter, would have had to inject them for him, so he would have had company one way or another... 

I am reluctant to pull the banners down, but oh so grateful to have felt like celebrating myself. So grateful to have been cocooned in loving messages from California to Peru. Most of all, I suppose, I am grateful to have tidily tucked my infections away into what I Hope was the final admission of the year. Winter will be upon us soon, I hear you say, but my eyes are still busy with summer days...