BISAN

Bisan,

your cat came to me in my dream.

White, yet not entirely - she was real -
not as a cloud, she was eating lime.
Yes, I was holding a round green lime 
in my hand and she stole it to play.
Cats love to play, don’t they?
I say this as one who has never owned a cat 
or even, I confess, known or loved a cat.
But this cat, your cat, I presume -

although she was perhaps any 

of the lost cats doomed this Nakba - 
this cat, I say, knew me well enough 

to drape herself, Queen like, across 

my throat, as I was lying down in my bed - 
not the bed of my English home, 

in the country that questions me on home,
but the home of my dreams, 

the bed in my dreams, 

where I grew from baby to girl, 

to on the verge of something between 

girl and woman to be.
Protecting my throat, but also 

preventing me from moving, rising, 

perhaps even speaking - 

she was everything, 

commanding the wholeness of me. 
I feel her now - a heavy white scarf, 

a sacred promise, bound to me, 

as I to her - a symbol 

beyond my understanding. 

Ya Rahman. Ya Raheem. 

Ameen. 

© Shaista Tayabali, 2023

Is anyone able to write much, if anything, at this time? This poem came, as my poems come, fast, as if in dictation, from a place of necessity, to tell someone something in the only way available to me. Part of me feels as if there has never been a genocide experienced this way - in the palms of our hands, in real time. And yet, the power of reading the testimonies of Primo Levi and Victor E. Frankl, not to ever forget Anne Frank, many years after the facts, did not render my heart any less broken. I say broken, but it is not yet so. Just chipped, cracked, rust filled, despairing of being human. This poem is dedicated to one of several young Gaza journalists I follow, like millions do, on Instagram, hoping, willing her to survive. She is Bisan Owda @wizard_bisan1, and the others are Motaz Azaiza @motaz_azaiza, Plestia Alaqad @byplestia, Yara Eid @eid_yara. Others have been killed already. I inch forward in this mural, baring my teeth through tears. 

(First image via Bisan's instagram page @wizard_bisan1

Second is a mural I am working on at home

Poem participating in DVerse Poems Open Link night)

THE KITE FLIERS

When kites fly 
across blue skies
and border divides,

Gaza and Israel unite.

We make the kites,

we fly the kites, 

over the wells of hate.

We carve the sails,

we choose the colours for the tails;

in ribbons of orange and red and green -

we speak across the steel.

When we fly kites

across blue skies,

Gaza and Israel unite.

© Shaista Tayabali, 2023

In 2011, when I watched the Dispatches documentary on the Children of Gaza, I wrote two poems. The first was for a little girl named Amal, who was nine years old, and suffering terrible migraines from the shrapnel in her head. The second was about the kite flying festival set up along the border, to foster some kind of fun and relief for Palestinian children. A competitive spirit with Israeli children followed, but years later, members of both Hamas and the IDF, grown men, used kites to set fields and warehouses alight. There was an escalation. People died, including a 15 year old Palestinian teenager. The festival was in danger of being cancelled. 

Moments after I had located this second poem, I learnt that last Saturday, the 7th of October, the Israeli family who were responsible for setting up this year’s kite flying festival, were shot by Hamas. Their kibbutz was on the border. My friend, the writer Joanne Limburg, tells me, ‘It is better to have a breakable heart than a hard one.’ So I, we, must find a new way to hope.

FLYING KITES IN GAZA

When kites fly

across blue skies

and border divides,

Gaza and Israel unite.

We make the kites,

We fly the kites, 

over the wells of hate.

Our borders are planks of wood -

We carve the sails,

We choose the colours for the tails

in ribbons of orange and red

and green -

We speak across the steel.

When we fly kites

across blue skies,

Gaza and Israel unite.

© Shaista Tayabali, 2011

I wrote this poem a year and a half ago in response to the Dispatches documentary on the children of Gaza. Thousands of children flew kites over the Gaza strip in July 2011, claiming a new world record for most kites flown simultaneously. A competitive spirit was alive in the children, ready to sharpen their sails against their Israeli kite fighters. The poem feels so naive, so childish, in the face of what appears to be a systematic genocide of the people of a tiny strip of land. But the voice is accurate - the kites were everything that day. Slogans were written on the kites calling on Israel to end the four year blockade, calling for peace. It is painful that children are supposedly always at the heart of ending or restraining a grown-up war. And yet no-one actually listens to children.   

MALALA

A river streamed 
through my room.

It scared me
It broke my wardrobe
Scattered my clothes
It released my dresses
from yesterday's bond
It made me wear them

I wore it
and it wore me
Reminded me...
Oh God, it was my love's 
favourite, this dress,
and this waistband
and all these things...

A river streamed
through my room
And my room
became a garden.

Some years ago I watched a documentary called Syria's School. For me, these occasional glimpses into the lives of my younger sisters across the globe afford precious viewing. The documentary offered the girls at school the opportunity to write, and present poetry, to some of the leading literary minds in Syria. One poem captured my heart, moved me so deeply, I rushed to find a pen and scribbled the poem (above) from memory. The poet's name was Nour Aibash. I wonder where she is now, and if she is still writing. Last year, I watched a documentary on Gaza's children, and a little girl called Amal tugged at me, so I wrote her a poem called 'Crossing Borders'. She has shrapnel buried in her brain, behind her eyes. You can imagine how this affects me. I cannot think of Amal without my eyes blurring with tears but I hold her in my thoughts. Across the globe, the fierce courage of Malala Yousafzai is less unknown....

Gunned down just three days ago, Malala takes our breath away because she is still fighting for her life, knowing her worth, knowing there is a greater battle awaiting her for the rest of her life. Awarded Pakistan's first National Youth Peace Prize, this lovely 14 year old has already witnessed beheadings, public floggings, and is the recipient of constant death threats. This violence has been countered by her lucky fate of being born the daughter of a poet, and educational activist, who has inspired in her the stubborn, feisty spirit of boldness that I recognise in myself - a father who is proud of his daughter, and tells her so openly from a young age, plants a seed of belief that no other man can destroy.

Malala means 'grief-stricken' in Pashtun. The thing that Malala's father feared the most has come to pass, but recognising the face of this kind of courage, I feel sure Malala is glad it is her and not her father who stood before the bullets. Aung San Suu Kyi is the perfect example of this face of courage, of a daughter determined to live the life of a beloved father cut short in his heroic prime. It is a good time to be a woman, Malala. Despite the adversary trying to convince us otherwise, you are the greatest proof of it.

(A wonderful documentary called Class Dismissed about Malala in 'her' Swat Valley was filmed by Adam B. Ellick in 2009 should you wish to know more.) 

from Sunia to Miral

क्या हो रहा है? क्या हो रहा है?

दिल में चोट? पेट में दर्द?

Her name is Sunia. I don't know this yet. We haven't spoken yet, so she does not realise I can understand her words. I let her Hindi-Urdu wash over me in cool streams of green.

"What is happening? Does your heart hurt? Your stomach?"

क्या हो रहा है? मुझे कह दो? क्या सोच रहे हो?

"What are you thinking? Will you tell me?" 

Her husband says not a word. And I know she does not really require a response. I know she is really saying, "Beloved. My beloved. I am here."

Her name is Sunia. It means 'one who listens'. She is beautiful. She is younger than me and anxiety has erased her smile. She leaves for a while. Her husband gets on with his chemo. She returns, with two little boys. I smile at her. She relaxes, walks over, and I give every ounce of my joy and spirit and Addenbrooke's knowledge until she looks young again. I tell her I know her doctor. I trust him. I know a cure for anti-sickness. A home remedy that makes her laugh. I know too, that her husband is brave, for saying nothing, only turning a little green and a little yellow now and again.

When I am in hospital, I don't watch the other patients. I talk to them, but I watch the relatives. The Sunias. The listeners. Even when the patients say nothing, the listeners are listening; for the slightest hitch, to the breath beyond words, to the heart of the one who is suffering.

दिल में दुख है? Is there pain in your heart?

Beloved, I am here.

Sunia is Pakistani. She looks like Freida Pinto, the Indian actress from Slumdog Millionaire, who plays Miral in a film about Palestine, chosen because she looks like Rula Jebreal, the Palestinian author of the novel and screenplay. The director of the film is Jewish-American Julian Schnabel, who, listening to Rula's story, fell in love with her. Everyday we see faces that remind us of others, of the interconnections, of politics and pain. And then we have a conversation. And the complexities fall away. For a while, only a single language exists. The language of the heart.

CROSSING BORDERS

"If I meet an Israeli, I will tell him I am not a terrorist. I am Palestinian."
Amal, 9 years.

On a tiny strip of land,

miles you can count

on the fingers of your hand,

bombs are falling

to the rhythm of their own time.

They leave behind

nothing - only rubble;

if they could,

they would even take the sand.

In your mind,

run the fingers of your hand

through that sand,

sift through that sand.

Names lie in those grains,

of blood,

of brains -

the last remains

of the martyred ones,

children,

whose hopes die young,

whose flesh remember pain,

who ask this question

time, and again,

“What did we do

to end this way?”

then plan their sweet revenge

on you.

I want to convince Amal of peace.

In dreams, I prevent your bloodshed;

but she will have to learn to live

with the shrapnel inside her head.

One day the bombs

will stop falling,

and the rivers

will overflow with fish,

and the guns that

little boys play with

will cease to exist,

will be exchanged

for gifts

of fishing rods, and binoculars,

to see beyond,

to dream beyond

the Gaza Strip.

Amal and her surviving brother, Mahmoud, amid the rubble of their home.

- Shaista Tayabali, 2010

shadow of the scarf, luke powell photography