NIGHT OWL FRIEND

(for Lola Roberts)

If I could believe
this was fated,
each hour, each act -

infinite mistakes,
all carefully counted,
I might relax

and spin lazily
in my own orbit,
name my moons

and be fearless.
That was ever the plan
from the moment

I didn't die.
Or maybe long before
my mother named me

Shaista -

when I was a twinkle
in the sky.
Do parents still say that?

I believed it.
I believed I was a star
fallen plucked precious

jewel. If I could believe
then,
why not now?

© Shaista Tayabali, 2015
screen print 'Harvest Moon' by Sally Elford - you can find more of her work at http://www.sallyelford.co.uk

A WALKING POEM FOR THICH NHAT HANH

I bought a treadmill.
What would Thây say?
Would he smile and shake his head

or look bemused the way he looked
that day I waited in line
to ask a question that did not need

answering?

The birds are busy and my shoe is broken
and my foot turns out and in
to awkward positions. My unfocused eyes

make nausea of the green world around me.
Oh dappled light, what would Thây say?
Walk outside!

Thây who is struggling to sit upright,
is recovering from the stroke,
which left him paralysed and comatose;

Oh Venerable One
who took three months to drink
a quarter cup of tea,

who watched the full moon patiently
like when he was sixteen,
and Têt promised endless treats

of moon cakes and dragon dance
and calligraphic Buddha chants.
Oh Patient Impermanent One,

these broken steps are made for you;
these perfect steps I make for you
make me free.

© Shaista Tayabali, 2015
first image prompt via Magpie Tales

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.

GEETA SAAR - THE THEORY OF EVERYTHING

'Whatever happened, happened for the good.
Whatever will happen, will also happen for the good.
What did you lose that you are lamenting about?
What did you bring with you that you have lost?
What did you produce that got destroyed?
Whatever you have, you received it from here.
Whatever you gave, you gave it back here.

What belongs to you today, belonged to someone else yesterday
and will belong to someone else tomorrow.'

I read these words - the essence of the Bhagavad Gita - on the morning of a curious day. I was not very well but determined to catch The Theory of Everything at the cinema before it disappeared. I broke a rule by smuggling in a non-sanctioned cinema drink (coca-cola not bought from the cinema offerings) and once seated, proceeded to be mesmerised by the effects of my action. The bottom quarter of my latest journal of poetry had been resting in a pool of spilled coke for the few minutes it had taken to reach my seat in the dark, and many of the endings of my poems have turned into a kaleidoscope of smudged colours and shapes.



You know me - I handwrite my poems on handmade paper. I dry flowers and use real ink. I have never considered making copies of entire books or typing up poems beyond the world of my blog. You might think this sort of thing has never happened to me, but I don't have that excuse. Once, in Italy, I stood on the edge of a pier scribbling verse. A boat was gathering speed in the near distance. A laughing crowd on board smiled and waved at me. I waved back. A wave, a real watery wave of enormous proportion grew like a Hiroshige painting and engulfed me, my book, the lines of verse…
I love my poems and I feel sad for a while after these strange encounters of loss, but the lesson in detachment and impermanence never fails to impress me.

The Theory of Everything was a lesson in impermanence and the laws of change. Eddie Redmayne deserves every accolade. His portrayal of Professor Hawking's descent into the deepest human understanding of the nature of time is subtle, intelligent, worthy of the subject matter. The ending is terribly moving because the director uses a cinematic ploy to imagine time rewound. Redmayne's Hawking slowly gets out of his wheelchair, stands up, his feet uncurl, his legs walk him down steps, he reaches down to pick up a fallen pen. The moment does not feel like fantasy. Professor Hawking's special gift is to make us believers in ourselves, first... the universe and its cosmology, second. 

(The Geeta Saar quote was taken from the instagram account of Deepika Mehta, a yogini.) 

THE DREAM WORK OF SNOWDROPS

'...I wanted
the past to go away, I wanted
to leave it, like another country; I wanted
my life to close, and open
like a hinge, like a wing, like the part of the song
where it falls
down over the rocks: an explosion, a discovery;
I wanted
to hurry into the work of my life; I wanted to know,
whoever I was, I was

alive 
for a little while…'

- excerpt from 'Dogfish' by Mary Oliver

It's a funny thing being a poet, and reading the poetry of greater poets and finding yourself therein, and wondering what there is left for you to write, but then discovering that you, the small poet, and they, the great poet, are inspired by the same poet, and so you are connected... I discover in a radio interview that Mary Oliver reads Rumi every day. And that her poems have been becoming shorter as a result. Because once you have said the thing, what need is there for further decoration?

Snowdrops make me feel that way. Also tulips in a vase which remind me of the tulip giver, my mother whose birthday it is tomorrow…

LETTER TO...

Dearest...
The sun is setting and it is quite beautiful.
Elsewhere the setting sun is more beautiful. I know this because someone elsewhere has a more powerful camera, and is on holiday in a more tropical place. Or more historical. A pyramid perhaps, or a cave of swimmers.

I was supposed to be somewhere this morning, but a migraine ate my eye. I was dreaming when the doorbell rang, but I cannot remember. I have always lived furiously in my dreams. Once, I kept a dream diary, but then I wondered why.

It was my mother. She brought tulips. She arranged them and made me a cup of tea.

There was snow yesterday, but only a threadbare carpet, nothing to excite my nephew and nieces with. The doorbell rings again. It's the supermarket delivery man. 'Where's your snowman?' he asks. 'Where's the snow?' I counter. A little post-migraine banter. He calls me swee'hear', though he's never met me before. I like it when strangers on the phone call me 'love' or 'darlin'... It comforts me. I like it when my mother calls me Dilly Girl. It derives from Darling Girl, but only she knows how the derivation came about.

I fengshui-ed my flat last night and am sitting on my newly arranged sofa looking at the patch of visible light and branch-webbed sky. Why am I?
The pheasants reply. And I am satisfied.

Dearest, where are you? And will we ever meet? I am melancholic and content. Is this a perfect life?

Love...

SECRET SCRIBE

Every colour on Turner's palette
walks past the scribe.

I am still, not quiet, in ochre
and my mother's five silver bangles -

but the one I wanted to write about
was the white dupatta

which seemed to float
with a life of its own

waving goodbye.

© Shaista Tayabali, 2015

I found a bench tucked into an arch of pink and white morning glories, and managed to scribe a few secret poems under Bangalore sky. When they say India has beautiful colours, they only say the truth. Today, at the hospital, I was back to the blue walls and shadows, but part of me was still cocooned a thousand miles away.

secret poem prompt via a Hyderabadi dverse poet

BREATHING IN GREEN WOODEN SHEEP IN BANGALORE

When last year made its entrance anthropomorphised as a Horse, I felt excited by the prospect of movement and energy, but the year proved exhausting for me. This year, I read, is the Year of the Sheep, the Green Wooden Sheep, more specifically... and I do like the sound of gentle sheep, inching forward, munching greens, restfully engaging with trees... I am doing much the same in Bangalore - watching children swing and slide down tunnels in sandpits about as heart racing as I am able for...

The other day, sitting outside on the balcony, I observed two boys playing with a balloon. It doesn't get much simpler than that, I thought. And then the balloon popped with all that enthusiasm - I couldn't help laughing when I heard one of the boys bemoan their fate, blaming the other boy naturally. 'What did you do?!' he wailed. I was reminded of Pooh and Piglet fully intending to give Eeyore a plump red balloon (I think it was red...) but finally handing him a sad shrunken rag of rubber to put in and take out of his empty honey pot... (Pooh having helplessly eaten all the honey)...

It's a quiet, peaceful life here, with the colours changing from morning to afternoon...

A few days ago we heard the news that our beloved monk Thich Nhat Hanh is no longer in a coma. He has opened his eyes, is responding with chuckles to humorous stories, is breathing. I have been re-reading the memoir he wrote in his 36th year, Fragrant Palm Leaves, almost sixty years ago. He is a very easy monk to love! Meanwhile I make the most of the quiet hour, trying to conquer the fear and anxieties that gather about my troubled physical form...

KINTSUKUROI

Outside, I hear morning birds and someone begins the onerous task of sweeping dust. Dust in India cannot be swept away. Can be swept from here to there, but mostly it fluffs itself up in the air and lands daintily again by the sweeper's feet, as though to suggest they would both be more comfortable if they could just accept each other for what they are to each other. Dust provides the sweeper with a job. And the sweeper provides dust with excitement, a little flurry, a change of pace and place.

Why is dust? It is not pretty or useful.

Why is illness? It is not pretty or useful.

And yet here I am. Dusty with illness and that ubiquitous meaningless word - pain.

And yet here I am, loved.

I am kintsukuroi, broken pottery joined by gold dust and laquer. Where the break joins, there is no seamless transition. You can see the suffering and the mechanism of healing. A friend of mine sent me an image of such a bowl made more beautiful by its interesting narrative; she hoped to inspire a poem. But the kintsugi philosophy made me want to write more words than a poem might permit. It has made me think of my broken pieces joined not by stitches and scar tissue, but by the gold dust of love and friendship.

I have always been hesitant to return to India since my diagnosis of lupus in 1997 because I didn't want to return ill. But I am ill, and I am here, and both must be joined somehow. I say I am kintsukuroi not because I am made beautiful, but because I hope such beauty can be possible. Are we all broken and scarred in some places? Then are we not all beautiful? I sat outside for a few moments yesterday, and a cluster of sari and bangle clad women gardeners wove a little circle around me. They were off in the distance one moment, and the next were crouching inches from my feet. One lady asked me the time - maybe she really needed to know. Maybe she just wanted to hear me speak, make a connection. We don't speak the same language - I am in the south of India, where the pace of life is very different from Bombay. But the smiles are the same.

The only difference now is the smiles are not for me - two small figures fascinate their passers by. I am just in the shadow of their smiles. But shadows never looked more beautiful.

THE QUIET SLIDE TO FLIGHT

December 2014. The year is gathering her skirts for the final curtsy. She has been Queen Elizabeth in her Dame Dench-Shakespeare In Love guise for me this year...you know that scene towards the end after the performance of Romeo and Juliet, when Dame Dench/ Her Majesty hesitates for a moment contemplating the icky muddy pool of dirtwater before her, and then with a disgusted look at her noblemen and courtiers, leaps over the hurdle herself?
That's the way I'd characterise some of the last months of this year. An icky pool of dirtwater to be navigated with little elegance and none of the flair I have grown accustomed to.
I am already looking back on the years of 2010, '11 and '12 with a fondness for the old days of pomp and glory. There were weddings to attend, and finally, 2013 brought me my three angel nieces; but since the summer of their births, I have been sliding into a graceless decline.

I have been riddled with infections all year and most of last year too. And although my walk across the stage to be congratulated for my MA graduation with distinction, was filled with pride and confidence... still, this disease haunts my every waking moment.

So of course, in times of great distress and trauma and impending depression, one must buy a plane ticket and get the hell outta dodge!

I am flying far away from fenland and gorse bush to a green city where two small nieces are going to get a little shock when their Aunty Shai rocks up below their balcony and hollers out their names... Will they wave excitedly or look bemused, or take it in their stride that their Aunty Shai has returned to the land of her birth? I shall report.

Meanwhile Merry Christmas mes amies, mi amigos, my beloveds... Let us meet again soon when '14 turns to '15 and we are freshly birthed into the new year.