A THOUSAND FLUTES

There are trees everywhere, on my shelves. 

You could call them books, or leaves. 

Ada Limón says, ‘It begins with trees’

and although some might argue that 

‘it begins with water’, with the first separation 

into ‘the waters above and the waters below’

maybe we, in our separation, begin 

our ways of seeing with trees.

For example, we never remember 

that we are mostly water.

We always forget to drink 

in the casual days of abundance -

only when we are parched in the desert,

forced into famine, or praying at Ramadan, 

do we remember the sweet 

source of our beginnings.

We cut the willow down 

because she was rooting 

into the walls of our house, 

seeking the river.

I think of this most days. 

It was an us and her moment 

we never foresaw -

not my tree loving mother, nor me.

My mother adapts. She sees 

the holly that was hidden 

behind the willow

flourishing, freely, now.

I’m still in nostalgic mourning. 

The willow was a thousand flutes

singing all day long, like Radha 

dancing to Krishna.

Pigeons and doves made love in the 

shifting light of a green curtain.

Everything was music and dance

almost all year long.

It’s still now, empty.

My grandmother would have hated it;

Vera loved the willow 

as much, or more.

I liked hiding inside her.

She was not just tree, 

she was water too. 

But being water was her undoing.

She was planted outside a house, 

on a human road, between grass and car. 

Perhaps her death began 

at the moment of her birth? 

Did trees begin with us? 

No, they began with the sea. 

Oh, why do we end tree stories?

Do we?

My shelves are filled with leaves, 

and the willow lives inside me. 

The kissing and the killing

forever entwined within me.

© Shaista Tayabali, 2025

Photos by me, in Emmanuel College, Cambridge - post infusion

Art of Radha Krishna by @abhiart (Abhishek Singh)

Poem included on Dverse Poets Open Link night, a community who have been sharing poetry as long as I have had my blog... 

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.

 

FOOTSTEPS OF THÂY NHAT HANH

This morning, a huge procession left Tu Hieu temple in Hue, Vietnam… thousands of people had traveled from all over the country, lining the path around the half moon pond where Thây had washed his feet as a young novice after taking care of the buffalo in the fields. The great temple gates were opened for the funeral cortège to pass through, and almost thirty pall bearers lifted and carried the heavy chrysanthemum laden casket on to the streets. The crematorium was miles away, so across the world, thousands of us witnessed the greenery and local scenery of Thây’s hometown, as the walking procession took to cars and motorcycles. I was filled with writerly thoughts, which I hope to make sense of someday.

But for now, I wanted to share a little book of poems I wrote for Thây one night, many years ago, when my dear friend and acupuncturist, Dr. Ly, told me that the Plum Village entourage were arriving the next day. I worked all night to put together some of my poems, flowers, leaves and bark from the Silver birch tree in our garden, while my mother sketched Thây as a boy. Dr. Ly told me later that Thây read my poems out loud to the monastics and lay friends at the table, and then seemed so surprised to see himself as a boy, ‘How did she know I looked like that?’ 

JANUARY BOOK REVIEW IN FEBRUARY

‘A nightingale sang in Berkeley Squaaaare!' I've been burbling this song all day long, and I have no idea why... suddenly the line bursts off my tongue and into the vulnerable ears of whichever family member is around or on the phone... my grandmother used to sing with a tremulous treble she assigned to the throat operation which cured her of nodules. The operation destroyed the strength of her singing voice, she said, but I liked her trills and quivers. I like appropriating that quiver; it makes me feel very 1950s...

It is Mum's birthday today. Yesterday, I prepared the traditional Parsi celebratory dessert of rava, sweetened semolina and milk with rosewater and pistachios... I made some fresh milk bread to go with hot morning chai, and late this evening I cooked some figgy chicken with mashed potatoes and sugar snap peas (Dad loves the comfort of mashed potatoes) and on we shall go into the snowy depths of February. Meanwhile, I thought I'd share some of my readings from last month.

The Body Knows The Score by Bessel Van der Kolk has become one of those therapeutic classics along with Gabor Maté’s When The Body Says No. I found it a compelling read for the most part except where certain therapies were only available under almost laboratory type conditions. The last quarter of the book was therefore interrupted by my next reads, but Van der Kolk is so compassionate, I would absolutely recommend the book to anyone who has suffered trauma in any form.

Azadi by Arundhati Roy is a a very slim volume of essays, including ‘The Pandemic is a Portal’, the brilliant piece Roy wrote upon India being shut down with a four hour grace period. Can you call that grace? No, indeed. And while you’re reading Roy, take a look at Zadie Smith’s Intimations, another beautiful slim volume of essays - both writers are masters of their craft. 

Whenever I can’t put a book down, I am always amazed and gratified that my eyes can withstand the brief marathon. It is always a testament to the author - I felt this way about Deborah Levy‘s The Cost of Living, which is the second memoir in her living autobiography series. The memoir is a response to Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, and is full of poetic energy, and the feminism of starting over after the failure of a long marriage.

Nikesh Shukla’s Brown Baby was also a memoir I did not want to put down. Writing against the grain of despair in Britain's divisive society, which regularly displays its prejudice, Shukla answers complex questions asked by his young daughters. Innocent enough questions, difficult to answer with ease and hope and the promise of joy. And yet, Shukla finds the vein to draw that hope from.

And lastly, my beloved Eva Ibbotson’s A Company of Swans and A Countess Below Stairs, rounded off my first month for the pandemic new year, with humour and a little dance in my step. 

THE WINTER'S TALE

It is almost March. Half an hour to go, and we are in the middle of a snowstorm. My toes were frozen in the car a few minutes ago but our lovely warm house is heating me up nicely. In 27 countries around the world, across 927 screens, audiences just witnessed Shakespeare transformed once again into a different mode of art. Ballet this time. Our auditorium in Saffron Walden wasn't full because of the snow, but for those of us who were able to attend the screening, a cup of hot coffee or a glass of white wine eased us into our seats. Some of us may have had a chocolate brownie as well... hey, it was gluten free! Surely that's healthy?

Ryoichi Hirano burst on to our stage (well, our screen) and we were, to a woman, transfixed. His presence, his beauty, his actorly ability to transmit jealousy (the most potent of our emotions?) was unrivalled by any of the other dancers, even though every other dancer was obviously perfection embodied.

The youthful delights of spring and first love in Act Two contrast with the winter and storms of imagined betrayal in Act One. But Ryoichi disappeared and so Act Two was a bit meh for me. I mean, amazing, of course, but I drifted... do you drift when you watch the ballet or the opera? Or while listening to classical music? I am often distracted by the presence of all the other minds in the room, bodily with me, but each of us entering our emotional worlds, separately.

I was glad to return to Ryoichi in the final act. Hair whitened by grief, he was still magnificent, and when Hermione, the wife he thought was lost to him, is revealed to him in a dance of forgiveness, I felt almost as shocked as he was. And glad. I had missed Lauren Cuthbertson too - the ballerina who co-created her own role. A statue coming to life wasn't the only moment that stunned me - a doll masquerading as a baby, with arms and legs moving (ah, modern technology) almost made me miss the bear that wolfs down a poor courtier...

In the outside world, snow flurries awaited us, but the thrill of the performance had us on a high long enough to grab a frozen selfie... I hope you are all keeping warm and finding something to smile about. Google the gorgeous Ryoichi!! Or if such superficial things as a beautiful Principal dancer don't appeal, read Shakespeare - the ballet made me want, made me need, the words that began the dance.

PICC LINES AND PENGUINS

Evening. The sun has set, I think. The day has faded away, and I haven't really paid attention. The twins left this morning en route to the airport and the next chapter of their life. I, who have been on a rollercoaster month of rocky infections, antibiotics and hospital admissions, feel jet lagged. Woozy with tiredness, I want to sleep for days without hours. But keeping time with the clock, they say, is important.

September is here. I had a birthday. My mother travelled to Vancouver to be with her two brothers at a wedding, and returned.

I had two PICC lines inserted and two PICC lines removed. Today was the removal of the second. My arm doesn't feel free yet. Still weighted with the memory of discomfort, it will take a while for the entry point wound to feel healed.

Other things will happen this month and the next. But until then I am going to crawl away and hibernate. Until then, here is a picture of me in Ellie's penguin hat, sitting, tube-free in the hospital Jubilee Garden...

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.

CAMBRIDGE OPEN STUDIOS EXHIBITION

Continuing with my thread of artistry taking all forms, Wimbledon included, July is the month during which Cambridge artists exhibit their work - usually in their own homes and studios but occasionally in venues that act as surprising galleries. Like the Old Fire Engine in Ely where an artist called Michael Edwards is exhibiting his work. As the daughter of artists, I suppose buying the art of other artists is slightly suspect - but I like the idea of building up an eclectic art collection. One day, one day.

Mum has been using my portrait as her calling card this year. Which means all around the city, I am casually draped on kitchen tables and peeking out from bowls cluttered with car keys and spare buttons. Come visit if you're in the neighbourhood. Only one weekend more before the Open Studios comes to an end for another year. Portraits make great surprise gifts - most of Mum's commissions are for such gifts.