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

On Lymph Island

I live inside a cataract

in a dim and shrinking world

Peel back the blinds!

I bellow

but the clouds just don't hear.

I live inside a lymph node

A mean and shotty mass

I try to kiss it, to calm it,

to shrink it,

but the node just thinks me absurd.

I wrote this poem last year in October immediately after writing The Year of Yes. Poems sometimes tumble out of me one on top of the other, like an afterbirth, a kind of truth telling. The writing of poetry, for me, is the telling of truths that cannot be otherwise told. Etiquette disallows the real grit of chronic illness to be aired or revealed. I use my eyes and smiles for social occasions and my pen for revelation.

The lymph node. Is painful. My biopsy last year diagnosed me with necrotizing lymphadenitis instead of lymphoma, which was cheering. And is, on the whole, fairly painless. Except for one node. The right cervical node. I want to pluck it out of my neck, where it growls at me, thrashing and biting. I want to ignore it or soothe it or laugh it away, but this feverish animal on my neck clings to me.

painting: frida kahlo, self portrait with monkey, 1940

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

Journeys Into The Unknown

A few posts ago I dedicated a poem called Footsteps to my friend and fellow blogger, Renee. Her daughter Angelique let us know of Renee's passing. When I wrote to Angelique, the word verification letters spelt her mother's name. My own mother, sitting beside me, was moved to tears, but I felt happy and utterly, confidently assured that Renee, like all my spirit guides, will always appear when she is needed. I also feel sure she must be generously visiting all her many, many readers, sprinkling a shiver of laughter and that unexpected pleasure that only comes with brushing fingertips with the happy unknown.

Into a different unknown, travels my elder brother on the second leg of his globosocial adventure, the first part completed in Central and South America, this time to India. The journey began in Mexico City last October, and after 1000 hours of pro-bono work across 60 social enterprises and NGOs working with literacy, poverty, social discrimination, media branding and financial sustainability to name a few, you can imagine my pride at being his sister!

Of course, at the moment he is, as usual, cutting things very fine... the flight leaves in a few hours from Heathrow, London, and Rizwan is still very much at home, in Cambridge, watching the IPL cricket with my father!

My brother carries with him precious cargo. A few of my father's paintings for his friends. My parents' paintings have been travelling across the globe for thirty years and reside in homes I have never visited. Someday, when I least expect it, I shall come across one of their paintings or portraits...

Perhaps our journeys are not so very unknown. After all, we are always travelling together.

first image from Renee's blog

second image, one of Father's treescape watercolours

Birthday Gifts

Last night I was invited to a delightful dinner party hosted at the Hawks' Club in Cambridge. My 'frock' received her due compliments, but I was also teased for not providing the night with la poesia. I soaked in the ambience surreptitiously, and on my return home, wrote this for Juliet, the birthday girl, whom we discovered was pregnant ... suddenly voluptuous figures abounded and sheepish hands were cupped around their own unnamed, special birthday gifts.

We, the twenty-three of us,

sit, among the candles;
our faces lit,
we bring ourselves to be
your birthday gift.

But beyond our smiles
and familiar faces,
still to come
are other graces -
unknown guests, unborn yet,

surely, birthday next,
they shall fill their places.





quote on postcard from Le Petit Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupery, "It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye."

Eye Meditate

Trying to meditate

while we wait,

sardines packed straight

at the eye clinic station

My nerve ends hum

with others' emotions

I breathe in fear

and breathe out tension.

Conversations

start, and stall

desultorily

Veterans meet

and greet

ostentatiously,

"Doris! Over 'ere!"

"Audrey! It's you!

What're you doin' 'ere?"

"Same's you, I expect.

Me eyes, but,

Fancy meetin' you 'ere."

Daylight melts

to a grim fluorescence.

Names are called,

pupils dilate.

We wait.

I continue

to try

to meditate.

This piece is dedicated to Keith Martin, my surgeon, my hero. When my name was finally called and while Keith gazed suspiciously into my foggy dyed eyes, he tossed a small nugget of joy across the tonometer... "I've been reading your prolific blog and I'm impressed." Woo hoo!!!! If only it were de rigeur to fist bump your eminent surgeon. Instead I settle for a demure, "Well, so long as you weren't bored"... while inside I am all glee. Le fruit de la meditation, peut-etre?

Footsteps

If I should die tomorrow
there would be many sorrows
but the deeper print
of my name
would carry you through
the pain

And if you should hear me laugh
I am only playing a game
Hold on, hold on, to the centre
until I find my way again.




I posted part of this poem before, in May last year while I was still battling it out in hospital. I am re-posting it with a new verse, for my blogfriend Renee, whose battle with Stage 4 Inflammatory Breast Cancer, has been described by the doctors as the beginning of the end. Awful phrase. Renee would scoff at it, if she felt more like herself. It is an extraordinary experience to have one's life touched so deeply by a stranger impossible to meet in this lifetime. But she has left her print upon me, the deepest imprint of her name. Renee. Find your way, Renee.

Deye mon gen mon

Beyond mountains, there are mountains
Haitian proverb

In 2003, Tracy Kidder published a book titled 'Mountains Beyond Mountains': the Quest of Dr Paul Farmer, a Man Who Would Cure the World'. Despite my years of prolific reading, I rarely recommend books. I am one of those who believes that books find us through some alchemy of their own. I am making an exception here. Read 'Mountains beyond Mountains'! It is the challenging and moving biography of Dr Paul Farmer, medical anthropologist and compassion incarnate, as told by Kidder, who travelled with, observed, argued tentatively and finally deeply admired and felt blessed by 'the fates that allowed my paths to cross his.' Farmer found himself in Haiti in 1983, still pre-med, and has never really left. The poverty, human rights abuse, relentless political and structural violence, the horror of multi-drug resistant TB and the HIV-AIDS epidemiology, are extraodinarily lit with humanity - that gift that is spectacularly our own.

This is a picture of Dr Paul Farmer attending to one of his patients in Cange, central Haiti. I love the challenging, almost mutinous look on the little girl's face. She seems to be saying, "Ah oui? So you think you can save me?" And I like the corresponding seriousness of Paul Farmer's expression. "I'm trying cherie." But, despite her pretty lacy top, and the silver hoops in her ears, she looks tired, a little dejected. Does she have TB? More than likely. HIV-AIDS as well?

Kidder writes:

'In Haiti, we'd had a conversation about his daughter. A month after she was born, a woman had come to Zanmi Lasante (Partners in Health) suffering from eclampsia. It is a disease of pregnancy, of mysterious origin, found preponderantly among poor women. It leads to protein in the urine, hypertension, seizures, and sometimes death, for both mother and child. The treatment is magnesium sulfate and delivery of the child. The clinic was very busy. Farmer was rushing around trying to get the treatment started. He could hear the heartbeat. He later recalled, "The mother was seizing. I said, Hurry!" Everything was going okay. Then the baby was born, and it was dead. A full-term, beautiful baby, and I started to weep. I had to excuse myself and go outside. I wondered, What's going on? Then I realised I was crying because of Catherine." He had imagined her in the place of the still-born child. "So you love your own child more than these kids?" he asked himself. He answered himself, "Look, all the great religious traditions of the world say, Love thy neighbour as thyself. My answer is, I'm sorry, I can't, but I'm gonna keep on trying." (p212-3)
These are the last lines of the book:
'Haiti was still bleeding away, like its topsoil. But there were some spots of hope. The Red Cross had announced plans to establish a transfusion post at Zanmi Lasante. Nearly twenty years since Farmer had watched a woman die in Leogane for lack of a transfusion, and he finally had a blood bank that could serve the central plateau, a source of blood that patients wouldn't have to pay for. "No more weeping over blood," he wrote to me.' (p301)

Just as Kidder felt all those years ago, so do I thank the fates that brought this inspiring being into my field of awareness. I am blessed with my own medical opthalmologist and glaucoma surgeon who save my sight, my consultants and registrars who make the latest monoclonal infusions available to me; but it is the pioneering work of doctors like Paul Farmer that gives me a kind of inner radiance, a faith beyond faith to believe that mountains beyond mountains can and will be healed.

Inukshuk

Dreams are made of these
sights on the Waterfront

The Vancouver Sun

is setting

on Canada Place

and the sea

looks rained on.

China and Japan are

microcosms

in a city of happenings

and lights are aglow

on Grouse Mountain.

Winding past the Maple Leaf Store

the smell of blueberries

and Douglas firs

brings me home.

Today is Valentine's Day, and a love poem is due; mine is to the healing spirits of the city of Vancouver. I visited in 2002 and my impression from arrival at the airport to discovering Frida Kahlo at the Van Art Gallery and Zora Neale Hurston at the Van Public Library, to the oldest trees on botanic walks in Stanley Park, the city simply enveloped me in a halo of perfection, a presence that I can only long to experience again. Winter Olympics are in full swing now, despite tragedies and from across the waters my friend Jo at A Majority of Two has delightfully sent me a parcel of Olympic 2010 souvenirs. A beautiful glass/ceramic Inukshuk, a pen carved in the shape of a Canadian Mounty, and a silver keyring. Jo, thankyou so so much for your thoughtful gifts. The Inukshuk sits on my highest shelf far from its Arctic home, where once it would have marked the threshold of the spiritual landscape of the Inummariit, 'the people who knew how to survive on the land living in a traditional way'. Some inuksuit were built to serve as message centres. They could indicate, for example, dangerous places, the depth of snow, the direction of the mainland from an island where seals or fish could be taken. These inuksuit were designed to be messages fixed in time and space. Others were personal notes left on the landscape -- perhaps for a wife to follow her husband at a later date, or as an expression of grief marking the place where a loved one perished.

The traditional meaning of the inukshuk is 'Someone was here' or 'You are on the right path'.
What could be more romantic on Valentine's Day, than these timeless messages of fidelity, faith and hope?

Images of Inukshuk via flickr, travelblog and lodestar

Girl with a Red Balloon

Late served food
for a single
girl about town
welcomes you
with open arms
Bursts on your tongue
in an explosion
of red chilli love
and wasabi charms;

Tempura thrills,
and the space
opposite
finds itself easily
and metaphorically
filled.

I wrote this at the Dojo noodle bar in town. Sometimes a girl needs to eat alone, and know the smiling face in the front glass window is her own. I am always passing by the weavings of others' lives, but from time to time I slide myself in to the picture, and taste the tastes through the looking glass. Back in hospital after the weekend for part two of the monoclonals, and I know I will be thinking of that sweet chilli dip and hot horseradish that are exploding on someone else's tongue.

Image: Stencil graffiti by Banksy