IMMOVABLE FEASTS

It comes rushing in with the sun,
the memories of who you were,
who you've always been - and you
want to give thanks for the bread
and the wine, and all the other times
you stood in the sun

but your eyes snag on a shadow
stamped, immovable, on the wall.

(c) Shaista Tayabali, 2016

Image and prompt from Magpie Tales www.magpietales.blogspot.co.uk

(It bothers me, to end on shadows and sorrow, but that's the way the poem comes, sometimes. Easter is that way - sorrowful, then joyful. Happy Easter,dear readers 🐣)

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.

GOLDEN OCTOBER

they are calling this month, this year.

And who wants to miss
the golden month,
the golden year?

So I tuck my auto-antibodied
phenoxymethylpenicillined feet
into golden sandals
and find a tree.

Up between the branches
I see wing curves drifting
and between my toes,
leaves crackle.
'Auburn,' I tell myself. 'Not rust, dry,
dead, bones.'

And when the light falls a certain way,
I can almost believe what they say.

© Shaista Tayabali, 2014

I am beset by infection. Three of them playing havoc. The dentist informed me that my wisdom tooth infection could be life-threatening if I was unlucky. Shall I add that to my other life-threatening illness? (I didn't ask, but thought.) He is rather dishy (for a dentist), so I grinned on the outside, grim on the inside. And fled. 

Golden October sun this afternoon so I take a book and Ming's pen out for a walk. I sit under the horse chestnut, meaning to read quietly, but my landlady's son has spied me, and keeps running to me to discuss conkers and pick pieces of bark to make conker and bacon-bark sandwiches. My legs are stretched out before us, making handy tables for our bowls of soup… when his mother comes to collect him, he commands me to hold still, admonishing me even as he is lifted into the back seat of the car. Head skewed at an alarming angle, hollering instructions as she drives away. He is four.

When he is gone, I write about birds and dead leaves. And when I finish the poem, I see that I was wrong about the dead and the dry. The tree is the most alive thing. I can hear her shaking herself free, shrugging off leaves that curl and somersault after their own hula hooping sway to a soft crackling flump beside me. I keep thinking I hear footfalls.

I hold very still till Connor returns. 

Autumn in Madeira by Jacek Yerka via Magpie Tales

A GAME OF PATIENCE (IN MEMORIAM)

The great vast network connects

and divides us - time stretches us thin;

we give years to the knowing,

the unravelling of others -

in the end, when change comes,

we know nothing.

We learned nothing yesterday

that we remember today

but for the sense of

once upon a time, when we began.

© Shaista Tayabali, 2014 

Image: A Game of Patience, 1937, Meredith Frampton via Magpie Tales 

An Elegy to Peter Lapsley, a Stranger, and Chaitan Maniar, a Friend

For years I had been wanting to write an article for the Patient Journey section of the BMJ - the British Medical Journal. Finally, I wrote to the editor, a Peter Lapsley, and explained my desire to create awareness about a condition that still befuddles doctors and patients alike. Peter was lovely in his email and promised he would consider my piece even though a long list of articles were waiting to be published. Only one other patient had written a lupus journey, so I started to write mine.

Then I began my MA and the article slipped out of my mind.

A few weeks ago I recalled it. MA done, I remembered Peter and although I was deathly embarrassed about the time that had passed, I crossed my fingers and sent the article to him.

No reply.

And then, finally, a rather chilly one line message from anonymous, saying Peter had died last year and could I contact the current editor of the BMJ instead.

Dead. Just like that. Time passes. And you miss a person's life altogether.

So I googled Peter, just to see. Just to say hello to his ghostly internet spirit. And here he is. Doesn't he look nice?

And I discover two things: the first is that he was a literary giant in the field of fly fishing. And second, Peter had lupus. Peter died because of leukaemia but having lupus would have made him more fragile.

And I find myself wishing he had told me. It would have made me send my article pronto. It would have given me that special fellow feeling we lonely lupus patients need. But of course, he was a professional medical editor. Did he want to, though? Was he tempted?

Isn't it funny how we know death is ever present, can claim us at any time, and still we don't act. We truly live, believing life is endless, forever, a patient river we can swim in at our discretion. Are we the most arrogant of species, or simply the most hopeful?

Death claimed my father's oldest and best schoolfriend a few days ago. A prominent lawyer in Bombay, Chaitan Maniar was something of a Shakespearean hero. Noble in the true sense of the word. He was a literary giant too, in a nonchalant way - a man who could quote poetry and philosophy and the law as easily as he breathed and walked. I am trying not to grieve for him, because I was his friend too, and true friends leave nothing undone. This picture is from the last time he visited, two months ago, kissed by evening light, with his best friend's son and granddaughter…

SUMMER SOLSTICE

The clematis are dying in purple paper clusters,
a pretty, dusty, crepuscular fading
of old lace, doilies,
beside the newly hatched delphinium -

only the daisies seem invincible.


© Shaista Tayabali, 2014
image: Sweet Summer, 1912, John William Waterhouse from Magpie Tales

SWEET LITTLE LIES

You buy cupcakes with your cappuccino
and the barista asks after your love life.

You play dumb and ask after his
(you overheard him and his friend -
the coffee drinker before you -
discussing how she played him).

He breaks it down scene by scene -
(how he went to her birthday and
bought her Millie's Cookies
and everything
but then she never bothered
to show up to his
after he took her out to lunch
and paid
and everything).

And then he turns to you
till rung up, and chatting
about the single scene

as though I might be prowling
and buying cupcakes,
in exchange for dates,
might just be my thing.

I deflect, and pick my way
over to a solitary table
and scald my tongue on the first
bitter sip
before the chocolate lacing soothes it.

What if I told him the reason I was single?
That my body was a battlefield
and my flesh destined for needles
and my eyes a network of scar tissue
and how pain can become the glue?

But later, when two girls come by
and I hear them giggling together

I trace the tip of vanilla butterfly wings
and drench my tongue in lemon curd
and let the chocolate orange sing to me

and be glad the only thing he heard
was that I was free.

The single poet, contemplating lyrics...

Dog on a Sofa via Magpie Tales 

BEFORE CHRISTMAS TURNED INTO AFTER

The wind is a howlin' tonight and although snow might not greet me tomorrow morning, I wonder how the trees will fare… this year I don't feel properly Christmassy (whatever that ought to feel like when you are no longer a child and the news confronts us with climate change and animal welfare and human rights horrors), and it was only when my beloved friend Mary sent me the poem below, that I felt a little comfort…

       BC:AD

       This was the moment when Before

       Turned into After, and the future's

       Uninvented timekeepers presented arms.

       

       This was the moment when nothing

       Happened. Only dull peace

       Sprawled boringly over the earth

       This was the moment when even energetic Romans

       Could find nothing better to do

       Than counting heads in remote provinces

          

       And this was the moment

       When a few farm workers and three

       Members of an obscure Persian sect

        

       Walked haphazard by starlight straight

       Into the kingdom of heaven

                                                      U. A. Fanthorpe

This was the year of the death of a great leader, and in my smaller world, births of a future. Christmas was meant to be about birth and those three members belonged to my people's obscure Persian sect - truly obscure, because nobody ever seems to know the Three Wise Men were Zoroastrians! I like to think of those obscure gentlemen, walking haphazardly, guided only by starlight, (and what else would one want to be guided by?) straight into the kingdom of heaven. Those last two lines? My idea of heaven...

IMAGES FROM THE MAG: The Ice Cutters, 1911, Natalia Goncharova
                                                 Madonna With the Milk Soup, 1510, Gerard David 

YOUNG ONES: THE NONCHALANT ANGELS

A little boy sits opposite me,
 absorbed in a game,
on a gadget I do not own,
 for which I have no name.

He kicks his heels up,
 (only his toes reach the ground);
in the chair beside him, his mother sleeps,
 curled, legs raised far above the ground.

He calls out to her,
 when he hits a particularly high score;
she jolts awake, unseeing,
 then falls back to sleep once more.

She is my sister, in this place
 where the needles preside;
it heals me with an aching love,
 to see her son never leave her side.

© Shaista, 2013

There are angels everywhere. I saw one in the little boy opposite me. I wrote the poem half-way through my infusion (and hers), but afterwards, I took some cake across to him. A friend recently celebrated his birthday and since I was too fatigued to attend, he dropped by some petit fours this morning. Thankyou Simon! The nurses enjoyed some first (by 7:30pm they were flagging as much as I was) and then I walked over to the angel. He took only one piece, even though I cajoled him to take more, and he spoke so sweetly and gently while his mother looked on and smiled. We suffer from similar conditions and exchanged the usual wry affection, each as tired as the other, and I thought of kneeling before them and reciting my poem, but my brother was waiting to pick me up and so I walked away on a wish of luck and hope and friendship postponed. I think the little boy would have liked 'his' poem, but the cake was poem enough.
I am working on my memoir, slowly, but with great determination - the chemo/monoclonal infusion takes eight hours and I write and create and connect across time with poets and like minds - today, Tupac Shakur, who, at 18, rhymed soulfully in journals that resemble mine.

first image from The Mag

WEAVING FOR CAMELOT

There she weaves by night and day…

She has heard a whisper say

A curse is on her if she stay

To look down to Camelot.

She knows not what the curse may be

And so she weaveth steadily…

"I am half-sick of shadows," said

The Lady of Shalott.

- Alfred, Lord Tennyson

I am half-sick of shadows too… Twenty years this month, since I last spent Christmas in India, where cotton wool replaced the snow on the fir tree outside our bedroom window (we could only ever reach the first layers of branches, so the tree always looked extremely strange and wonderful). This Christmas I don't want to think about commerce and duty, only the memory of the Red Cross choir who would come to sing for each house on our street, and for the candles lit and mangers built in every department of the hospital where my father consulted. Simpler times, authentic times - Santa was fun but not the essence. Jesus was, and so was light and hope...

Image from The Mag: Autumn on the River, 1889, John Singer Sargent

SCOTOMA (DANCER IN THE DARK)

My eyes dance,
my soul trembles
my nerves collapse under the strain -
I close my eyes,
the dancer whirls,
I seek her limbs in vain -

Hold on to me! I cry,
but she will not settle down
She scintillates and obfuscates -
until, exhausted, dissipates
and I am sane and still again,
and I am sane once more.

© Shaista Tayabali, 2013

I wrote about my scintillating scotomas two years ago (I called that poem Firework in My Eyes). Once, it happened just before my nephew's baptism, while I was in the church and all I could do was hold on to the chair and trust that I would see again. They begin as spots of flickering lights which devour my visual field in shimmering arcs or teichopsia (from the Greek for 'town hall' because of the zigzagging patterns of fortified walls)... 'Don't look at the light,' suggested a doctor. As well tell me 'don't breathe'. How can I survive without looking at light? The scotomas are temporary events. They pass, and I am left with a classic migraine with aura. Is it neurological? Is it cardiovascular? Or simply rotten luck?
To be a writer, you have to write. The words take time to form themselves. I am trying to write, trying to earn my place, but I am struggling so much to keep the faith. I am never lost entirely to self pity, but I do fear uselessness. As a daughter of artists, however, there is one anchor I use to keep myself afloat: in all the murk, I am always able to determine colour. And that thought cheers me even as I swipe at the dervishes to keep still...

All paintings by Degas, but the first prompted by Magpie Tales

IN THE QUIET, A RESURRECTION

Some days when the spirit
of the laughing Buddha is still,

the clouds gather ominously
and we shelter each other;

I am waiting for light
to pour though me.

I am always turning away
and towards prayer;

will faith ever hold me
still?

One single terrifying moment
of divinity is all;

the days are sand and sea
and we know nothing.


(c) Shaista Tayabali, 2000

First image from The Mag 

The artist, Sir Stanley Spencer, was famous for the religious motifs in his paintings, but equally so for being true and loyal to his hometown Cookham in Berkshire where he was regularly seen pushing a pram which held his easel and canvas, and for wearing pyjamas under his suit if he was cold! I've done that sometimes - surely the mark of an artist?!!

Second image from Gregory Colbert's Ashes and Snow collection, which surely is a form of divinity.

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

PULSE

She was ever in the light,
her head softly pillowed,
Even with her fading sight,
she gathered in the gold.

Give me silks and satin,
velvets, even cotton,
Let me arrange the palette,
in blues and orange autumn.

Do you see the sky behind me?
Or do I mean the sea?
Do you feel the tempest?
Do you see beyond me?

One dark shadow, yet to overcome -
Can you hear it in my heart?
That faintly murmuring, faltering drum,
that stops, and starts.

 © Shaista Tayabali, 2012

image prompt: Jan Steen, 1665, from magpie tales

OBEISANCE

Her face always existed,
the poetry came later;


When the leaf finally fell,
his heart bounded to catch her.


© Shaista Tayabali, 2012
Red Roofs by Marc Chagall, courtesy magpie tales


I love the stories flung into Marc Chagall's paintings - always something new and fascinating to discover. There are love stories here, odes and supplications, but arcing over everything, a tree, a forest. Which is how I niftily weave in the fact that, on retreat, I took my five mindfulness trainings, and, in the tradition of Thich Nhat Hanh's lineage, was bestowed with the name Radiant Forest of the Heart :) I think it is a good name... forests are lovely, dark and fathomless, lit inside by wild, magical creatures  - I can work well with such a name! Pure Ocean Heart or Perfect Serenity might have been slightly harder to live up to!!

REFLECTION ON THE SOURCE

It unnerves me
the face in the glass,
that is sometimes me
and sometimes not.

I am unbalanced
by this perfume,
that is sometimes you
and sometimes not.

The heat
stretches out the thread -
in the rain,
it nestles closer;

All around me
the web glistens,
sometimes real
and sometimes not.

image source: the mag

FUNDING SHAISTA

The birds they are a twittering, round the birch,

inside of Spring, 

This morning, there were daffodils and daisies,

And hidden things -

And bursting behind the door,

purple lilac softly knocking,

ready dressed to come a calling. 

Through my many long years of illness I have often heard this phrase used to describe me: 'she's out of the woods now' - I always find it a curious phrase, because as Frost said, the woods are 'lovely, dark and deep' and sometimes it is enchanting when you're ill to stay cocooned in the warmth of your frailty. But, like Frost, I too have had promises to keep. Promises to live and love, and be all things spring and light.
For two years now, I have been in the woods about funding for my monoclonal treatments, which have been erratic, and for which I learned how to dance with radio, newspapers and medical journals - but now, ta-dah!! I have received a note from my consultant's secretary confirming 'that Rituximab will be funded for the next two years'. Shall I frame it?

To celebrate, I wander around the grounds of Emmanuel College, illegally feeding the ducks Japanese rice crackers, and befriending one in particular with whom I discuss further promises to keep. The duck warns that he will hold me to my promises - but I don't mind. I shall return and make him proud. For the next two years, at least. At least.

first image prompt from Magpie Tales

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

Sea Changes and Red Threads

The sea blew away
my identity

without asking -
the sea knew me,

stormed in
without asking -

and I gave in
gratefully.

© Shaista Tayabali, 2012
The sea was at high tide along the Gold Coast of Australia, in the last days of 2011, but we were permitted to let the waves buffet us between two red flags. The salt sea spray scraped away eons of my past life. It is 2012, and I am experiencing a steady bliss, an endless river of joy; the monk David Steindl-Rast describes this joy as 'that kind of happiness that doesn’t depend on what happens'.
I catch myself in moment after moment thinking 'This is it. This is where I have always longed to be.'

Not just reunited with both my brothers, but meeting, at long last, my beloved artist friend Jeanne-ming Brantingham, who fascinated and riveted us with tales of the red threads that connect her to a precious life. I am one of those threads now, and will hold on carefully.
I wish us all a quietly joyful year, but every year seems to peak and trough, so if this is as good as it gets, that is alright by me!

Image of Marilyn Monroe courtesy Magpie Tales

The Moving Game (for Angelina)

from Magpie Tales

I move myself
from room to room

No pawn
I am the Queen

On the board
on the ball

I decide
when I fall

And when
to begin

the game
again.

© Shaista Tayabali, 2011
A poem for my sister Angelina, who has been forced by back ache to take a temporary back seat in the musical chairs of her daily life. Heal well, girl. The music plays on, and you will join the games soon enough.

Stopping Ghosts By Byron's Pool

In The Orchard by emka, trek earth.com

For over a week, there has been a Lighthouse Festival in Cambridge, celebrating all things Virginia Woolf. I attended a lecture held at The Orchard in Grantchester, the corner of England where time stands still (at ten to three, and there is always honey still for tea). In Grantchester, your heart could stop, and you would lay down happy, all sorrows long forgot, and dreams fulfilled, even if they were not.

Rupert Brooke

The lecture was on the Bloomsbury group - you know, the disreputable 'lived in squares, loved in triangles' lot - Woolf, Bell, Keynes, Strachey, Grant, Carrington, Forster, and on the outskirts Rupert Brooke. The lecturer was wonderful, and each illustrated detail of their lives and loves shimmered against the gold and green of the apple boughs outside the Tea Room. We were promised tea, and we had tea, finally outside on the green canvas deck chairs. And I thought of Dawn, my friend Dawn, who promised she would never be very far away, and clearly could not resist autumn in The Orchard. A couple seeing me all alone (a young woman! all alone!) engaged me in conversation and then led me across autumn leaves down to Byron's pool. (That sounds dodgy but I assure you they were delightful). Rupert Brooke, described by Yeats as 'the handsomest young man in England', wrote the following lines about Byron's skinny dipping adventures in the poem that has immortalised Grantchester...



Michael Sowa, The Little King, from Magpie Tales



'I only know that you may lie

Day-long and watch the Cambridge sky,  

Until the centuries blend and blur

In Grantchester, in Grantchester...

Still in the dawnlit waters cool

His ghostly Lordship swims his pool'  

I felt the ghost draw near, and then we saw Byron's Swans, majestic and moody, and I thought of Brooke, writing these homesick lines in Café des Westens, Berlin, in the spring of 1912, dreaming of King and country, aching for a piece of green England, while around him, Germany gathered itself for war.

In Cambridge, the ghosts are everywhere. I don't mind them at all.