HAFTSEEN

It’s Navroze today, the 21st of March. Spring equinox. That daffodil time of year. A good Iranian creates a beautiful haft-seen table, as described in this article perfectly. ‘Haft’ is seven in Persian, and the seven objects to be displayed all begin with the Persian letter ‘seen’ … S.

It’s not a big Parsi thing as far as I recall? And not a practise we have ever engaged in as a family, but it does look delightful when done… as would any feast table at iftar, Eid, Diwali, Passover and Christmas… beginnings, middles, ends of years. The seasons are scuttling by faster than ever, humans are humaning so fast that we have already ushered in the dawn of our intelligence companion - dear old Chat GPT, invisible amanuensis, ever ready with a thoughtful answer, memory ever updating. Feeding us and fed by us. An Additional Intelligence. 

I mentioned in a previous post that I had been attending poetry workshops once a week… in January, I began attending a God Fellowship course in tandem with studying the Hebrew Bible with Hadar Cohen, a mystic Arab Jewish scholar, who possesses that rare ability to invite deep spiritual and spirited thought by the quality of her listening. In Hadar’s case, the peace she creates is secondary to the justice and universal liberation she works for.    

Listening is an art we aren’t encouraged to practise. It’s the talkies we like to engage in. Chatters by nature, our opinions have become currency. The radio has been replaced by podcasts and Instagram can be dipped into all day long. I love podcasts. I think I’m subscribed to over one hundred and sixty! I have uncounted tabs open on my various devices, an enormous list of movies/ documentaries to be watched and partially read books glower at me, reproaching their once loyal, now absentee friend.

I like to think I will make a longed for return to reading. I like to think I will attend to my patiently waiting novel. My yoga mats stretch out, hopeful in purple and pink… but… early this morning, a song rang out loud and conspicuous - ‘Pretend you’re happy when you’re blue!’ - and I knew Dad had not slept, was desperate for a cup of tea and company. The sun caught him out the other day, as he soaked up rays in the doorway. He fainted and Mum had a tricky time trying to manage him back to bed, and then, when he still hadn't fully regained consciousness, down to the floor - I was at the hospital having an infusion. The paramedics arrived and were brilliant, but Mum had already wrenched her back by then. Dad’s ok, Mum’s ok … Nat King Cole sets the tone… and I, trying not to cry most of the time, keep quilting the patchwork of my days, a haft seen of its own.

(Images of the Haftseen above are by Pauline Eleazar for Savoir Flair)

(Hadar Cohen can be found at her own website and at Malchut, her Jewish Mystical School)

VIEW FROM BED

A week ago was an IVIg day. For a year, protocol has required me to have a covid test on the Thursday before the Sunday infusion, but rolling out across most lands today are ‘the end of covid restrictions’. These are words that do not inspire feelings of delight and freedom in the immuno suppressed person. For us, once again, the personal negotiations, with each situation, begin. 

And yet… something has changed, I think. Some deep understanding of fatigue, of the way an invisible source can derail your forward movement, has entered human consciousness. It hasn’t affected man’s desire for war, oil and nuclear arms. But between the two, I think a dialogue has begun. Or, at least, space has been created for dialogue. That’s progress. 

IVIg this month was sandwiched between two Rituximab doses. In the interim, I walk my bundle of cuddly fur and attempt to be fully in the present moment. Aware of wisteria and magnolia at their plumpest. Aware of sunshine and friendly dog related conversations. 

Two pairs of not so tiny hands have arrived from Malaysia and Papa has company shouting and screaming and jumping all over him. Games are being invented fast and furiously and bath time is once again a special English delight…

At the hospital, in between joys of dogs and nieces, I managed to catch up with my friend Daisy, who had a little cry when we wrapped our arms and masked cheeks around each other, and then proceeded to coolly sketch this masterpiece of Zadie Smith. Next commission: Ocean Vuong.

View from the bed, the faux blue chair… cloudy with a chance of sunshine. (How about your view?)

THAT LONG AWAITED THING

I stumble on a root
as I pass the prettiest cottage,
the one that makes me look twice, anyway;
there's no one around
and then, suddenly, there are, 
hordes of us, out for the sun.

I am cosy enough, bobble hat

and turtle neck, winter boots and long black hair -

well, I say black - I mean tiger

striped, the covid Bengal look, 

plumped up by inertia,

endangered only by sleepy somnolence.

Past more roots and the London 50 sign,

ochre homes and ochre leaves,

leaves burning on the friendly wind,

banks of snowdrops,

blackbirds heralding

that long awaited thing. 

I park myself by the berry tree,

damping my book on a mossy wall - 

these are covid tricks,

for covid times,

when paths are lean, and 

not a mask in sight. 

The 'SHE' fell off the Shelford sign

at the Chinese take away - 

a mark of this year's wear and tear;

the mayor and the spy 

put up plaques of their own -

a mark of wealth and long roots sown. 

The poet snails by,

tithing her time,

she was grown when she arrived,

and though loved, unseen, unknown,

she became that awaited thing 

and SHE WROTE HERE will do. 

© Shaista Tayabali, 2021

Photography by me, except for the blackbird in full throated song by Kathrin Swoboda. 

Linked to Dverse Poets for Thursday poetry night ...

HAPPY (SUPERWOMAN) NAVROZE!!

It is the spring equinox today, and all around the world Parsis, Zoroastrians and Iranians are celebrating Nav Roz, or No Ruz, which translates to New Day. But also, following Celtic and Saxon tradition, the goddess Ostera is celebrated by Wiccans and druids at Stonehenge, the goddess Isis brings rebirth to Egypt, Passover includes a thorough spring cleaning in Jewish homes, and in Russia, Maslenitsa is observed as a time of light, and a return to warmth. 

An article I wrote at the end of last year was recently reprinted in the magazine 'Parsiana' with an illustration of myself as Zoroastrian superhero, with a heart of fire, which is one of the coolest things that has ever happened to me. I plan on having a giant poster reproduction of it to remind myself on lost days that I have a heart of fire. Thank you, Farzana Cooper, fabulous illustrator!

In case you missed my article 'Half Parsi, Half Muslim, Full Woman', I am including it in full here...

HALF PARSI, HALF MUSLIM, FULL WOMAN

‘Name?’

I say my name, in full.

‘Date of Birth?’

I say my date of birth, in full.

‘Religion?’

‘Half Parsi, half Muslim,’ I say. In full.

She looks up at me. I am standing in the classroom, as each of us do when the roll call reaches our letter in the alphabet. ‘How can you have two religions?’ she asks. Maybe she is smiling, maybe she isn’t. I cannot remember because this process occurs every single year, on the first day of school after the monsoon holidays are over. ‘I don’t know,’ I say, although I do. I have two parents. And two religions. 

‘What is your father?’ In India, this is quite a common way of asking which religion you belong to. ‘What are you?’ begins with this classification, if your name doesn’t already ‘give you away’. ‘My father is Muslim,’ I say. And watch her write it down. I protest. How young I was when I began protesting is unclear to me. All I know is that by the time I was ten I had already decided I'd had enough of my mother’s religion being erased from my identity. For that is how I perceived the act of a figure of authority deciding for me that my father’s religion was the defining classification of my personhood.

I am a feminist. I came to an understanding of this word first through the writings of Alice Walker and her fulsome, inclusive definitions of womanist. But that was at university. So there was no word for what I felt at the thought of the denial of my mother’s religious identity. In India this is more than which place of worship you are allowed to enter – it weaves into every aspect of your life - your birthing ceremony, your childhood years, your teenage relationships, your marriage, your divorce or inability to divorce, and then the decisions that will affect your own children’s lives. My mother had a spiritual, emotional and psychological crisis when she fell in love with my father, because she had always assumed she would marry a Parsi like herself. Parsis are now a tiny community: a thousand years after leaving Persia because of Arab persecution, and of sheltering in India under the premise of never proselytising the religion – Zoroastrianism – we number less than 60,000.

You notice I have only just mentioned the ‘other’ religion. Indians know that to be a Parsi is to be Zoroastrian in a way the world does not want to know that to be Muslim is to be Malaysian, Kurdish, French, Moroccan, Norwegian, Somali. Naming ‘Zoroastrianism’ has only become a reality since we moved to England. A non-reality, ultimately, because no one has heard of Zoroastrianism. Well, unless you happen to be a bonafide Freddie Mercury fan, or you are a Professor of Iranian or Avestan Studies. The Jehovah’s Witnesses who used to knock on our door heard ‘Rastafarian’ every time my mother opened the door, and explained she did have religion in her life.

What was my Parsi mother’s greatest fear when marrying my Muslim father? That her children would be neither one thing, nor the other. Where would we belong individually, or as a family? Nowhere, she feared. And in part, her fears proved of substance. When my grandfather died, the Zoroastrian priest would not permit my mother to enter the sacred area where her father lay, wrapped in white muslin sheets, ready for his sky burial. She had been made impure by marrying outside the community and the pure land was no longer available to her. His cruelty broke her heart.

We make our choices. One day, when the need to visit the fire temple and light aromatic sandalwood became too great, my mother drove all of us to the agiary. The sign outside clearly stated, ‘Only Parsis allowed.’ My father prepared to wait outside the entrance. My mother, my younger brother and I began to troop inside. One small figure was missing. My older brother, clutching our father’s arm, refused to leave his side.

We make our choices. Are you Muslim or Parsi? What is your father? So when I was ten I placed the secret of my heart upon my mother’s palm. I knew no one would ever order me to prove myself a Muslim. If they did, couldn’t I simply burst into ‘Alam Nash Rakh Laka Sad Rakh’? Hadn’t my mother painstakingly taught herself Arabic so she could in turn teach us the calligraphy that would forever be written upon the scripts of our souls? Secure in my Islamic and Arabic traditions, I wanted to ensure my Persian Avestan traditions. There was one formal investiture and it was time conditional. Parsi girls may only ever enter the Zoroastrian faith through the navjote ceremony before we begin to menstruate. Oh that gatekeeping, so beloved to the male priestly communities across the globe, across time. Blood, the river of life, which runs gender-binary free through all human veins, suddenly turns into such filth that God himself would forsake us. He would be Himself here. Herself would merely commiserate over the monotonous banalities, send waves of abdominal healing and draw us ever closer.

It didn’t make much difference and it made all the difference in the world. My Parsi-ness, my Zoroastrianism, remains invisible, the secret I placed upon my mother’s palm. Remains the secret of my heart. My delightful father, who I worried would feel betrayed by my deliberate choice, was only moved to tears that his daughter felt so deeply about her relationship to the liminal, the mystical unseen ever-thereness of the spiritual world. I pray, as he does, in surahs and in gathas. A thousand years ago, his people may have persecuted my mother’s people. In me, persecution will not be internalised. Love made its decision so firmly, so deeply, that surely some tiny bat squeak of an echo is even now ricocheting back in time, to press my secret into the palms of forsaken hands. Here. Remember this. Love is a choice, waiting.

(first published in Sisterhood mag, Dec 26th 2017)

GATE OF LILACS

At night, I asked my father, 'If you could paint your nails any colour right now, what colour would you paint them?' He responded (with surprising alacrity), 'Lilac.' (Why? Because it's spring. Lilac season.) But I thought it perfect for another reason - I had been trying to decide on the perfect colour for an event the following day - Clive James' book launch for his verse-commentary on Proust, called, seemingly in accordance with the time of year: Gate of Lilacs.

It felt serendipitous.

I arrived at Pembroke in a bright red coat, white dress, feeling rather pale lilac about the gills, and plunged into another writerly adventure. At the entrance to Pembroke's Old Library, the new books were on display - Collected Poems, Gate of Lilacs and Sentenced to Life - I overheard a man order several copies. I looked up. Tom Stoppard. 'Halloooo!' (I did not yodel, but it was thrilling all the same.) He looked nice, almost approachable. And then he disappeared into the clutch of Englishmen and women milling around a seated figure.
 

Cambridge, according to one of Clive's oldest fans (102 year old Ann Baer of family Sidgwick) can become quite blasé - being able to boast a roll call of poets, rebels and Nobel prize winners; now the city breathed into the poignant spaces between the lines of the Poet Kid from Kogarah. 'Not a dry eye in the house!' Thus Clive, the Laughing Boy, merry after reading his epitaph. 

[He wrote a song lyric once that went like this:

'I've got the only cure for life, and the cure for life is joy

I'm a crying man that everyone calls Laughing Boy'…]
 

I thought of slinking away after the speeches and wonderful recitation. A small banquet of food was being laid out at one end of the library. I knew I couldn't really face chewing and swallowing in hallowed literary company (Carol Ann Duffy! Mary Beard! Andrew Marr!) but I drifted towards it anyway, just to have a point of focus. And found myself beside Oxford author and media commentator Douglas Murray. 'What is the correct etiquette,' I enquired, 'if you know the name of a famous person, but don't know them at all? For example, is it polite to say 'Hello, Douglas' or is it presumptuous?' Answer: famous people quite like being known, and more, being liked. So now I know. Over munchies, we discussed poetry, memoir and life, but not politics. He was charming, and had beautiful manners because at no point did he indicate by even a flick of the eye that he would rather be hobnobbing with the HobNobs. It was I, in fact, who was still eyeing up Tom Stoppard… 'What do you think?' I asked Douglas, whom I now regarded as the arbiter of good taste, 'is it ghastly for a famous person to have a stranger come up and regale them with personal information?' 'Depends,' said the arbiter. I shared my nugget. 'Definitely go speak to Stoppard. He'll enjoy that story.' But, I still couldn't. Instead, I talked to Prudence Shaw, Clive's brilliant wife, a Dante scholar, and confided in her that sometimes I can't summon the energy to 'achieve' - all I want is to play with my nieces. Play the days away.
 

Finally, a spot had cleared by Clive, and I retired to sit in his shade. I ought to say 'in his light', him being the star, but a friend always offers shade. The first thing Clive said when I sat down was, 'Have you met Tom Stoppard? Go and tell him I sent you.' I jumped up, carte blanche in hand, and accosted the poor man over his edibles. 'Clive sent me!' I chirruped. Oh, he was so lovely to me, so kind and interested - and asked me such pertinent questions about my illness that when we finally came to speak of Other Things, I couldn't remember anything I'd done since (and this is the nugget) I played Thomasina in Arcadia at sixth form. And was kissed for the first time, on a stage, by a boy whose girlfriend was in the audience. A girlfriend whose mother had directed the play. Septimus never kissed Thomasina in quite such a dry, papery way as on that stage.
 

The seats beside the star had finally cleared once more and, laden with coffees, Tom and I (Tom, Clive, Douglas… you see how democratic I am?) sank into chairs. We were just getting snug in a conversation about nostalgia for Bombay, and his time in Darjeeling when A Person cut across me to talk to TS. At first, I smiled politely (I understand, my smile said, I've been trying to do this very thing all afternoon) but finally, I stood up and offered my chair. Take it, I thought. Perhaps this means a great deal to you. (But the rudeness, mes amies!)
 

Never mind, never mind. One cannot collect all the beautiful shells on the beach, as the saying goes… I retired to phone for a taxi with good grace. Every time someone asked me how I knew Clive James, I explained that we meet across the drips. 'My mind is coming into focus again, thanks to Clive,' I told the playwright. It has been foggy for months, if you recall. I even had an MRI on my brain! All fine, all fine. Brain in working order. I feel as though I am at university again, only my lecturer awaits me on a faux leather chair while nurses attend to his (and my) blood pressure, heart rate and other vital signs. We are alive, and this being alive is everything. Now. 

HOW TO SURVIVE RITUXIMAB

1) Do nothing.

2) But when the drug, which makes your heart and mind race, wakes you up before dawn, lie there and hope for sleep again.

3) When there's absolutely no hope, totter out of bed into the kitchen, scrabble around the fridge and settle on a virtuous carrot.

4) Wash the carrot down with a few ginger biscuits, a glass of water and several white tablets. Remember you still haven't renewed your various prescriptions, promise yourself you absolutely will attend to it later and then forget all about tablets by

5) finding the most mind numbing documentary on Netflix. It's called, say, 'The Queen of Versailles' about a rather grimly mismatched couple determined to build the biggest, brashest house on American soil. You will retain nothing later except a solitary fact about the real Versailles almost bankrupting France with its gilt and glory. This from google and not the documentary.

6) No fever or tachycardia yet and you float about between bed and kitchen, eating noodles, watching rain turn to sun, and wondering why you aren't simply stepping out of your little house and walking the half hour to your nieces, one of whom has taken to saying, 'Shai! gone!' with a sad little flick of her hand.

7) At 4 in the afternoon, you have a high point of wellness. You steel yourself not to get dressed or put your contacts in, but to sit, still pyjama clad at the open window, sun blazing into your half shut eyes, drinking coffee laced with syrup and two Jaffa cakes melting as fast as you can eat them.

8) By half past five, sun turned to long shadows, you are in bed with a creeping temperature, a steady marathoning heart and a throat that burns with a thirst you cannot pacify. In the doorway, an old fashioned tape player and Catherine Alliott's rural comedy A Crowded Marriage. A fox has decapitated Cynthia. Not the heroine. The chicken...

9) You think about washing your hair.

10) You listen to the birds.

11) You write a blog post about how you survive Rituximab the wonder drug. The cancer drug. The lupus drug. The soon to be Parkinson's drug. You think about cupcakes, not the cake but the frosting. And washing your hair. And how quiet it is because the tape needs to be changed to Side 13. You take a breath, prepare to peel the blankets off your curled up legs and brace for cooler air. There will always be more tea, hot buttered toast and you will

12) begin again.

BEWARE THE IDES

Somehow it is already the middle of March, the day that did not bode well for a certain Roman Emperor. What would Caesar make of his day of doom transforming into Mothering Sunday? Into cards and flowers and cups of tea, lovingly made…

Didn't the year only just begin? Was I really in India only a couple of months ago? I feel as though I am lagging behind my own world, and that I shall catch up with myself at some later date, later year.

My mother is painting the bannister and the doors with fresh coats of white paint. Yesterday I walked with my father at an impressive clip, his long strides eating up the overgrown grass of our garden, my feet scuttling to keep time with his. Nothing on the cherry tree, I pronounced. And today, suddenly, he informs me it is in bloom. Snowdrops and daffodils are enjoying their brief coincidental meetings in clusters around the path that leads from my little den to theirs.

For four months I have had a strange occurrence with new eyedrops dilating my pupils. I have mini cataracts in both my eyes too. Cataracts! Sometimes I don't know whose body this is that I am inhabiting. Sometimes I wonder what other shapes my life could have taken had I not destined myself for the writing life. Would I feel less distraught every time my eyes stumbled? How unimaginative I am that I cannot be anything but this addicted wordsmith for life.

But that's just this life. Next life, I shall return as Keeper of Hedgehogs or An Ambassador for Pandas. A Pambassador.

TAKING STRAWBERRY HIBISCUS TEA WITH STRANGERS

(for Mary Haybittle)

On a Tuesday afternoon,
in the only place to be,
tables must be shared, politely.

I join the ladies at Number 5
and flash a half-mast smile;
not the full-watt:
they have been here a while

they fall silent with a proprietary air
and watch me
settle.

The mug and saucer are mottled grey
ceramic, but surprisingly light
as I lift my fruit and flower
blush pink drink to my lips
and for once feel happy with my choice.

The Jackson Five count out the alphabet
behind cutlery
and the humming of refrigeration:
I keep my legs firmly crossed
lest they break out, break dance,
break the surface charm
of a genteel English deli.

But the coffee here is Italian
and my tea came from the hibiscus tree:

I remember the flowers falling
and my bare feet rushing
to catch them
before the monsoon floods did.


© Shaista Tayabali, 2014

Arrived in the post, this delicate tea cup, half the size of my thumb,
from my beloved friend Mary,
to whom I dedicate the poem. 

FAITH (the other side of the coin)

Renoir

If I were to marry
it would surely
be springtime in England;

The birds would sing sweetly
all morning and
                     evening
The sun would shine brightly
                  but ever so gently;

My feet would step lightly
on a carpet of daisies...

White as the blossom
pure as the dove,
My heart full and golden
with love.

- Shaista Tayabali, 2013

Young Woman Picking The Fruit Of Knowledge, 1892, Mary Cassatt (for magpie tales)

The Lake Isle Fellowship

One of the pleasures of poetry is the way a line returns to you, unexpectedly. There you are, a schoolchild, being forced to learn of a poet's strange intent -

'I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,

And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;

Nine bean rows will I have there' - why? Why will he have nine bean rows? And why wattles? What were wattles to me? But learn the lines I did. And now, as I curl up on a rainy Sunday, and watch the green grass of home slowly soak up the new March rain, as I wait eagerly for spring to unfurl, I understand Yeats...

'And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,

Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;

There midnight's all a-glimmer, and noon a purple glow,

And evening full of the linnet's wings.'

Yeats was in London, longing for Lough Gill, like any exile in a home away from home, like any lover separated from their beloved...

'While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,

I hear it in the deep heart's core.'

I didn't call him consciously to mind, but what Yeats heard all those years ago, echoes now in me as his words resound with each drip-drip dropping of peaceful rain today. Happiness is a funny thing - sometimes it feels just as sudden as unhappiness. And all you can give thanks for is that the path has been trodden before, and with great care, by a fellow poet who understands your dreams.

image by digital artist Walter Smith for dverse

William Butler Yeats by John Singer Sargent, 1908 

The Magic Exhalation

So, according to trusty, reliable Jonathan Cainer, reader of the stars, today, Armistice Day, is also a symbol of rebirth in the magic of numbers aligning. 11.11.11. Apparently, Mars is about to leave my sign, pointing to a moment of exhalation. Does Mars explain my hectic activities this year? Perhaps. But don't we all exhale in autumn? And yet my cherry tree is still leafed! I am watching it every day, drawing my own inconclusive conclusions from the bright teardrops determinedly, bravely, hanging on. I read this the other day, in one of Adriana Trigiani's books,
Autumn is my favourite time of year; it seems to say "Let go" with every leaf that turns and falls to the ground and every dingy cloud that rolls by overhead. Let go. (So hard to do when your nature tells you to hang on).

Mars and Jupiter, eclipse and numerical alignments aside, I think I can let go this year. I made many dreams come true, just by hanging on. One of my sweetest achievements has been the music of your friendship. I spent years in isolation thinking I was alright... I had books! But as Anne of Green Gables discovered, it is the friendship of soul mates that really gets you through. Books aren't hollow, but they just aren't enough. And I am glad I lived long enough to discover that truth.

When the leaves do finally drop, and pool outside my window, I shall let them go, each and every one, and embrace winter, knowing that before they sink fully into the damp earth, each leaf will carry with it one of your wishes, and shall return in spring, to fulfil them.

In the right light, at the right time, everything is extraordinary. - Aaron Rose

Nav Roz, and A Prayer for our Daughters

Happy Nav Roz!! It is New Year's Day for Parsis and Iranians, and the Spring Equinox. Things are larking about in the garden, and a snowdrop, from a different time and season has hung about, staunch supporter of all things spring. I found him among a clump of ivy, sneakily enjoying the shade of the giant cherry tree. Can't wait for the cherry to bloom! Can't wait for my nephew to be born! Does he have to take nine entire months to gestate?!!
Today is also World Poetry Day, so I thought I'd post one of my favourite poems. Tough decision! Phenomenal Woman by Maya Angelou? Or something by Robert Frost, Rabindranath Tagore or Christina Rossetti... Dad's favourite poem du jour is by Stevie Smith, and it begins 'Nobody heard him, the dead man, But still he lay moaning...'

Below is my poem of choice. My beloved friend Mary Haybittle once hand calligraphed the entire poem into a little book for my father. I am only posting a few favourite paragraphs here. Modern life... such brevity is sacrilege. But if you are in your own garden today, then be sure to read the entire poem out loud to the listening trees... and then tell me your favourite...

A Prayer for my Daughter
by William Butler Yeats

Once more the storm is howling, and half-hid
Under this cradle-hood and coverlid
My child sleeps on...
And for an hour I have walked and prayed
Because of the great gloom that is in my mind.

May she be granted beauty and yet not
Beauty to make a stranger's eye distraught,
Or hers before a looking-glass, for such,
Being made beautiful overmuch,
Consider beauty a sufficient end,
Lose natural kindness and maybe
The heart-revealing intimacy
That chooses right, and never find a friend.

Helen being chosen found life flat and dull
And later had much trouble from a fool,
While that great Queen, that rose out of the spray,
Being fatherless could have her way
Yet chose a bandy-leggèd smith for man.
It's certain that fine women eat
A crazy salad with their meat
Whereby the Horn of Plenty is undone.

In courtesy I'd have her chiefly learned;
Hearts are not had as a gift but hearts are earned
By those that are not entirely beautiful;
Yet many, that have played the fool
For beauty's very self, has charm made wise.
And many a poor man that has roved,
Loved and thought himself beloved,
From a glad kindness cannot take his eyes.

May she become a flourishing hidden tree
That all her thoughts may like the linnet be,
And have no business but dispensing round
Their magnanimities of sound,
Nor but in merriment begin a chase,
Nor but in merriment a quarrel.
O may she live like some green laurel
Rooted in one dear perpetual place.

And may her bridegroom bring her to a house
Where all's accustomed, ceremonious;
For arrogance and hatred are the wares
Peddled in the thoroughfares.
How but in custom and in ceremony
Are innocence and beauty born?
Ceremony's a name for the rich horn,
And custom for the spreading laurel tree.

June 1919.

In the Spring of Five Hundred Tulips

In the Spring of five hundred tulips

the butterfly arrived again.

A brief flying visit

to examine the cherry and birch

before her summer sojourn.

I did see her.

I did not imagine her.

But that was weeks ago.

The tulips are fading now,

blown out, rusty at the edges,

pouting at the heat

creeping in.

We put out worms

for the birds, dried and brittle,

but it was the monkjack

who ate the tulips,

a feast of five hundred tulips,

while we waited and watched

the end of Spring.

Rain is in the earth today.

I am walking on rain today.

Hot yellow daisies grow fast
and thick around my feet.

And where the cherry tree stands,
the green is littered with white starlight.

Fallen blossom everywhere.

I am walking on stars.

And reading aloud from the stories of saints
to the listening birds and flies and worms...

I will be in hospital as you read this, attached to the drips for monoclonal antibody therapy.

I haven't been doing much lately, just hurting, like an ancient grandfather clock that needs winding soon. What is that lovely English saying? I am running Out of Puff!

So for now, I shall walk on a little more. On rain. And fallen stars.

Hanami sakura

Spring which starts in March and stays till May is a very busy period in Japan. It is the season when the most beautiful festival of Hanami is celebrated. The Sakura trees (or the cherry blossoms) all over Japan come into bloom for between seven to ten days. People hold outdoor parties to view the cherry blossoms.

Emperor Sage of the Heian period held flower-viewing parties with sake and feasted underneath the blossoming boughs of sakura trees in the Imperial Court in Kyoto. Poems were written praising the delicate flowers, which were seen as a metaphor for life itself, luminous, beautiful, fleeting, ephemeral.

Can one celebrate Hanami even when tragedy occurs? Can one bear the joy of new beginnings all around when one has lost or is grieving?

I ask this because the beloved Japanese family who housed and adopted my younger brother when he was teaching in Japan, have suffered a tragedy. Their younger daughter Yuki, my brother's friend, has died unexpectedly of a massive heart attack.


This is my Hanami sakura poem for her, and for my brother.


Yuki-san

Yuki, the cherry tree

is quietly blooming now

but the wind is so impatient

some petals are floating down.

Yesterday,

my mother and I

stood in the doorway

watching the willow

Green leaves are perfect in spring.

Today,

the scent of rain is here

I am drinking hot tea

sweet with memories

and listening to birds sing.

Yuki, the cherry tree

is empty now

the wind stole all the petals

but the earth is full

with warm white snow

and I know

you will return soon.

The cherry tree

will bloom again

and I know

you will return soon.

Shaista, copyright 2010

images from greg takanama hanami & cherry blossoms anime blog

A Pheasant's Success

On the last day of March
a fat pheasant
strolls majestically
past the daffs
and half eaten tulips
matching the last
soft rays of the sun
tail for tale.

Belly warm
from freshly mown grass
he claims his part
of the garden.

I stake mine
by mellow English lilac
while the light fades
and my fingers
curl inwards
with cold.

Ring neck Pheasant with Daffodils, oil on panel, George Woodford