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)

AUNT ALICE AND THE MARSHMALLOW FLOWERS

Dear Aunt Alice,

Somewhere, in other worldly places, you must surely know that I have inherited your perfect signet ring. Initials AJ carved in pretty curving script. I have been wearing your ring from the moment I received it from your niece Mary, because she thinks I am an aunt worthy enough to be in your mould. I thought of taking it off before a jaunt into London to keep it safe, but decided I wanted to take you with me since I suspect the last time you tripped around London as a young woman was, perhaps, a hundred years ago.

Liverpool Station was freezing cold, but once we were in London proper - Oxford Street proper - I warmed up. No snow to offer you this Christmas, but the lights! An assortment of charities paid towards these giant leaping angel figures. Beautiful for the crush of humans below to behold.

Shopping commenced. I'm not sure you would have approved of my purchases, but they were safe enough - a cosy camel turtle neck sweater, a leather bag and a pair of sunglasses. All on sale! Mind you, the prices, even on sale, would probably shock you. To ease the shock, my sister Angelina ordered cronuts and hot chocolate from a famous bakery called Dominique Ansel. Now this would have impressed you - a marshmallow cut like a crown was dropped into steaming hot chocolate, instantly blooming into a flower...

Later, on Great Marlborough Street, we stood outside Liberty and admired the Tudor Revival frontage. Did you know the timber was built from the ship HMS Hindustan? Or that in 1885, Liberty brought forty two villagers from India to stage a living village of Indian artisans? These handy facts are available from an extraordinary web of information us global villagers dive in and out of 'online'. I wonder what you would have made of Wikipedia? Here is something Wikipedia doesn't know: my father had three of his watercolours exhibited and sold by Liberty in the 1970s. Wikipedia you may have been on the fence about, but my father you would have loved.

I did feel a trifle faint in Liberty - so many people! - so was glad first to plop onto an inviting bed in Anthropologie, and then to mesh our way from Carnaby and Kingly Streets towards a Japanese restaurant, which also served my favourite Korean dishes, and to my delight, a delicious plum wine. For a nineteenth century Englishwoman, I suspect your gastronomic tastes possibly didn't stretch to the Orient, but maybe Mary will surprise me and tell me you loved experimenting with the new!

I got muttered at by a stranger for temporarily blocking the entrance to the tube - did I mention this was the day of the human crush? At these moments I am very much the hokey local from a tiny Cambridge village. By the time our train was hurrying us home, we were shattered and ready to slide, submerge and otherwise disappear into sleep. I hope you enjoyed the day out. Today is the last day of the year 2016. Soon 2017 will be upon us. 2016 has been a truly difficult year, for most of us, not least your beloved Mary. If you possess any magic, wield away. We need some magic. I can only be sure of one thing in the new year - I will continue to be the most loving and creative aunt it is possible to be. Keep your spirit beside me!

With love,
Your new friend-in-auntyhood across the century,
Shaista

Photos courtesy Debra Edward

GIRLS ON A BUS TO GEORGIA (O'KEEFFE) - PART II

My favourite piece by Georgia O'Keeffe turned out to be one of the first works I saw in the exhibition. Upon entering the exhibition, Mum immediately said, 'I think this is it.' She meant, dolefully, that we had scurried across London, reliving the same bus journey twice, hopped up and down the Tate Modern's escalators twice (we forgot to pick up our tickets at the booth the first time), only to find the O'Keeffe retrospective was contained in a single room. Happily, Mum couldn't have been more wrong. We were rabbits in a warren, the two of us, along with the hundreds of other Londoners who had also decided that the last days of O'Keeffe were not to be missed.

O'Keeffe began in 1916 with charcoal and wash on paper, determined not to 'use any other colour until it was impossible to do what I wanted to do in black and white'. But while she was painting lines, curves, shells, abstraction, her husband Alfred Stieglitz was busy photographing her hands, breasts, limbs, so that when colour finally exploded onto her canvas, he was ready to have it labelled erotica.

This painting, titled 'Grey Lines with Black, Blue and Yellow' is a perfect example of O'Keeffe naming her painting abstract, but the viewer being directed to think otherwise. With her flower series, this labelling became more pronounced. There is something voluptuous, sensual and anatomically vivid about certain flowers, the tongues of canna lilies, blowsy skirts of opening petals, but the painter faithfully representing them may be doing just that. These 'Oriental Poppies', I think, look just as they should.

O'Keeffe addressed her viewers: 'you hung all your associations with flowers on my flowers and you write about my flowers as if I think and see what you think and see of the flowers - and I don't.' Meanwhile, Salvador Dali painted a rose and was dubbed king of surrealism. When O'Keeffe painted bones and skulls, and meant bones and skulls, they called it surrealism. 'The bones do not symbolise death to me,' O'Keeffe made clear. 'They are very lively.'

Pretty too, I think...

The biggest surprise for most people with the range displayed at the Tate Modern was probably O'Keeffe's architectural paintings. 

She was homey, and settled into her places and spaces with the kind of certainty bones have when they settle into earth. She painted doorways over and over again, and explored the adobe dwellings of Taos Pueblo - here Mum found her favourite painting among the longest continually inhabited dwellings on earth.

On the bus to Georgia, I mentioned to Mum that someday I wanted to paint my own version of reality  as I see it through my highly compromised vision. It would look something like an impressionist's painting, I told her, with bits missing or smudged out. A few hours later, I stood in front of Cottonwoods, 1952.

There was nothing O'Keeffe did not attempt - from my own myopic world to worlds of synaesthesia and chromothesia - translating sounds such as cattle lowing and music, into something for the eye. In the last years of her life, there were clouds, vast expanses of blue, calling to mind Joni Mitchell's lyrics, 'It's clouds illusions I recall'...

GIRLS ON A BUS TO GEORGIA (O'KEEFFE) - Part I

Trying to get my mother to leave her Cambridge nest and my father (in no particular order), is a nearly impossible feat. But I managed it yesterday. I would like to say I whisked her off to London, but there was very little whisking, and a lot of cluelessness. Mum and I were two rubes on a bus. 

We managed the part from Cambridge station to Kings Cross just fine. Well, apart from missing our train by a whisker, and then having to wait for the next - but it was fine. We bought lunch and ate companionably as rural life turned to city scape. At St Pancras we managed to locate the right bus, thanks entirely to my mobile phone (it is not called a smart phone for nothing!), hopped on, whipped out our coins... only to discover this is not the way things are done in Big Cities. No more coins. You need cards - oysters or credit. My wallet, as usual, was tucked into the deepest recesses of my bag. The bus driver waited, patiently. We need to get to the Tate Modern, we chirped. Blackfriars Station? Oh yes, he said, after the bridge. Will you let us know? I'll let you know, he sez. We settle in, picturing something like this:

Cue an interminable number of stops later... Mum and I have been hawkishly watching the signs change above our heads, but not actually knowing where Blackfriars is in relation to anywhere else - Peckham Library, Bird in Bush Road, Bricklayer's Arms - not the most romantic or pretty scenic route - we were waiting for a bridge. Finally, I tilt my way to the driver's seat. Er... I begin. Oh no! he looks horrified, and proceeds to apologise so profusely and with such sincerity that Mum and I instantly forgive him and prepare for an unstable journey back to the village. 

Fortunately (yes, there can be good fortune even in a crummy situation like this), we had left it so late to ask advice, that we had reached the end of the bus route 44 stops away from Kings Cross - and the bus driver promised to restore us back to Blackfriars - he had to retrace his steps anyway, but there would be a switch to a new driver. Not to worry, he promised to explain our 'situation' to the new driver. He did. And they both laughed. Grrrrreat. Mum and I are now the laughing stock of the London Bus Company. 

We count out 20 stops before I start to get nervous - Mum, who had pointed out various landmarks now pointed them out again. Oh! it's that tree again! - and I tilt my way back to the head office. He gives me two options - both involve walking, turning left and then left, or right and then right. We tumble off, vowing to take a taxi for the homeward journey. Neither of us can face the bus in London darkness.

In case you've been wondering why Blackfriars - our destination was the Tate Modern, the most visited art museum in the world - 5.7 million visitors last year. (How did they find their way to the Tate?) I had read about the Georgia O'Keeffe retrospective and discovered that October 30th was the last day. So I was determined to go - and knowing O'Keeffe is an artistic inspiration for Mum, really wanted her to accompany me. The four hours it took us to reach her work were worth it. The retrospective was breathtaking, and beyond my mother's expectations. She and I had visited an O'Keeffe exhibition in 2003, in Vancouver, but unlike I, who fell instantly in love with O'Keeffe's later Taos paintings of cow and horse skulls in the desert, Mum had become disillusioned. O'Keeffe had been paired with Frida Kahlo (another reason I was instantly smitten) and neither had been given full scope. Mum and I have different reasons for loving O'Keeffe, which I think is a comment on her extraordinary range over the 98 years of her life.

I scribbled copious notes on the back of an envelope, and on a bright pink post-it as I roamed from room to room, but I shall save those for another day, another post. For now, here we are, on the upper balcony of the Tate Modern, exhausted but satisfied. My mother and I.

GRINDING PEPPER

Robert and Shana ParkeHarrison, Magpie Tales

Last night I spent a couple of hours dashing about the Tate Modern with a modern art aficionado. It was all energy and flux, transformative matter and the complex relationship of humankind to the School of Things. The work of Yayoi Kusama, the Japanese conceptual artist, was on display - her retrospective exhibition was a visual kaleidoscope of infinity rooms and thrashing limbs and hallucinations made interactive - the security alarms were constantly sounding because children were unable to resist touching; not just children, an unabashed adult too - no, it wasn't me, not this time, anyway!

I can understand the relevance of found beauty in pieces of wood, metal, Lucio Fontana's single clean slash of a canvas,

Do Ho Suh's red fabric staircase,

Richard Long's circles of pebbles and stones...

and Damien Hirst's butterflies or 'Sympathy in White Major - Absolution II'...

but then, with seconds to spare, as the armed watchmen were descending on us (armed with walkie-talkies), we suddenly came upon Monet. And it was all light and simplicity.

Give me trees and water lilies, I thought, give me the scent of oils and a paintbrush. Give me a garden and give me light. I'll add the stars and moon, later, when it darkens. Breath of Monet aside, the Tate Modern seemed to me to be filled with a kind of emptiness, an alienating distance, made more poignant by the DO NOT TOUCH alarms and signs. How to be touched without touching? It's a mystery. Unless, of course, you break the rules.

Where The Wild Things Are

Carol: "Hey, weird little thing, I like the way you destroy stuff. Good technique."

Max: "Uh... thanks."

Bull: "Hey! What are you doing?"

Max: "I...I... I'm just helping."

Bull: "By smashing our houses?"

Max: "These are your houses?"

Bull: "Look, we worked very hard on these. Then you, sir, showed up and started 'helping'..."

- from the screenplay of Where The Wild Things Are, 2009

I attended a poetry workshop in London a few days ago; my first, and very interesting it was too. I learned that my poems can stand up and speak for themselves despite some critique. I had a sense that the poet who ran the workshop dismissed me slightly because I was younger than most of the poets present, but she suggested helpfully that I would 'mature in time' :) She also critiqued one of my poems 'Something Beautiful' for being too reminiscent of 'Warming her Pearls', a poem by Carol Ann Duffy. The other poets disagreed vehemently; and since I hadn't even read that particular poem, all I felt was chuffed to have brought the Poet Laureate to her mind!! One of the poets at the workshop, Jane Clarke, is an Irish poetess making wonderful ripples in the poetry world. I am very much looking forward to her debut collection.

From that quiet haunt of white rose petals and cups of tea, into the wild rumpus of London's boroughs being burned and looted by a haphazard mob of 'yoof'. Simple to understand their greedy hungry acts, and simultaneously depressing to compare the reality of the revolutions occuring elsewhere, where young people really do have something to say. And yet despite there being no relation, one furniture store tenderly built, destroyed in a single act of arson, invariably sparks off memories of other buildings burning, other mobs, other riots. One group of people alienating themselves from the Other. Which made me think of 'Where the Wild Things Are', and how anger can be tranformed by the imagination, and even softened by wilfully experiencing and understanding the lives of Others.

The looters did not loot the bookstores. They left alone the stories, the wealth of creativity and the imagination, the poetry, the plays, the life of the mind.

Ideal Diaspora

Recently I wrote on my blog about the changing shifting states of my bedroom, a space that continually provides me with some measure of physical artistic freedom. And yet, a few days ago I was having a little moan about the constraint of living within the sphere of four walls, imagining myself one of Michelangelo's unfinished works of captives within marble, attempting freedom, never to be freed. Or like Ai Weiwei's sunflower seeds at the Tate Modern; a vast carpet of porcelain replica seeds, each hand painted and hand fired by inhabitants of Jingdezhen, free to be stepped upon by the public, but none to be opened, none to bear fruit.


That same day, the Telegraph magazine arrived, with James Mollison's photographs of children's bedrooms all over the world. From Ciudade de Deus in Brazil to the Yunnan province in China, a Palestinian refugee camp in Hebron to the Rendille tribe in northern Kenya, the gulf of inequalities and the bridges of similarity are all here - from the guns (for fun, Kentucky) and the axes (for work, Senegal and Kathmandu) to the dolls, the beauty pageant queens and future rabbis (Tokyo, Kentucky and Beitar Illit). This here on the left is Roathy, who is eight and lives on the outskirts of Phnom Penh in Cambodia. His home sits on a huge rubbish dump and his mattress is made from old tyres. He shares the space with five thousand others.

The final picture is of my elder brother, who is at this very moment in Phnom Penh, where Roathy is. They probably will not encounter one another. But then again, life is strange and powerful encounters await us at every turn and on every journey. Rizwan's globo-social projects include just such encounters. I am not sure what he remembers of his bedroom in Bombay. It was a multi-purpose room for most of our childhood. I had torn out posters of Princess Diana and Mother Teresa from a Hello magazine above my bed, I think he had his own drawing of Bruce Lee for a while. What we shared was the light pouring in from the windows and rain from the balcony, love from our parents and friends and books and games and lullabies and prayers bookending our days and beginning our nights. I love this picture. It contains everything. The ancient stone carvings of Angkor Wat, a book, a travelling rucksack, light and his smile.

Wicked Little Angel

There was an elderly pigeon walking along Finchley Road today. When he tired, he paused to contemplate a few sodden autumn leaves. London in the rain, he shrugged morosely. His glum little figure became a thing of memory as traffic moved and our taxi driver apologised profusely for his squeaky shoes. It's the rubber soles, he offered politely. Yesterday's taximan swore blue murder at an intrepid pedestrian, words that shocked my mother! But surprisingly, even he apologised at the end of the drive, with a somewhat complex tale about a cousin who wound up in prison because of... there are seven million detailed biographies entwined on these streets and no one is what they seem.


We have been swanning around in taxis in rainy London because Mum tumbled down a few mossy stone steps and a golf ball sized swelling bloomed around her ankle. But ice and my reiki righted the pain and we have travelled down Rotten Row where the horses canter, and past the Serpentine, spent hours in the National Portrait Gallery where the newly acquired bronze bust of Nelson Mandela resides beside portraits of Amartya Sen and Dorothy Hodgkin. This time Mum didn't return home determined to tear up her portraits as she is dramatically wont to do...

We are in London for my childhood friend's wedding at Langhams Hotel. A swanky affair! I wore a floaty sort of green ensemble, empire line, very Regency. Byron would have approved. And Father danced with far too many women. And almost no one knew I had just emerged from Rituximab infusions less than two weeks ago. And none of that matters anyway when I stand in awe of the magnificent exhibition of Diaghilev and his Ballet Russes at the Victoria and Albert Museum, surrounded by the living art of Karsavina and Nijinsky, Stravinsky and Massine, Leon Bakst, Jean Cocteau and a huge drop curtain detailing Picasso's Women Running on the Beach for Le Train Bleu.


Most moving was the performance of the Little Angels, an all-female children's folk ballet troupe from Korea. Sadler's Wells theatre was full of Korean war veterans, for whom the troupe was created in gratitude, in 1963, for laying down their lives in a faraway country in civil strife.


So there has been sculpture and sketches, ballet and marriage vows, but when I shut my exhausted eyes, what I hear... is singing. Have you seen Wicked, the musical? It is... well, wicked, really! Witches before they were witches, and why the monkeys became winged, and why Elphiba flings Dorothy into the cellar, and there's a man, (there's always a man), who first loves Glinda the Good and then decides it is the green Wicked Witch of the West he truly loves and suddenly everything changes... and I know, as Elphiba does...

"It's time to trust my instincts

Close my eyes and leap...

It's time to try defying gravity!

I think I'll try defying gravity!"

... and perhaps the return to a bed on the floor of a room in Cambridge, will not seem quite so dull after all.

First two images:

Nobel prize winning chemist and crystallographer
Dorothy Hodgkins, by Maggi Hambling, oil on canvas,
1985

Opera singer Adelina Patti, by Camille Silvy,
photograph, 1869