Running a Creche for Adults

Dear Readers,
My friend Jeanne-ming recently wrote to ask how I was and where I was, and I realise I am not blogging with any consistency this summer. Two months after my last treatment the waters started closing over me and each day I take the oars out and push the tide just far enough to keep breathing and smiling. I am awaiting the next admission with an eagerness that is not entirely normal :) Hospital tea! Yay! The narrow white cot-like bed that I somehow don't fall out off! Yay! And the needles! Er... no. No yay for the needles. I am not that far gone. My lips curl into a snarl at the thought of that particular familiar invasion.

Meantime, wolfish things aside, I have taken to a rather demure sport. Knitting. My grandmother, who lives in Vancouver most of the year, spends her summer here with us in England, and she is a champion knitter. I have put her to good use this year and am now the proud maker of a tiny sample of orange wool in garter and stocking stitch.
Grandmere is a beautiful and impatient woman who is teaching me new stitches at the rate of knots; so I took my knitting along to the eye clinic a few days ago. In between the ghastly facts of my growing cataract, my inflammatory cells, the myopically curved disc of my right trabeculectomy, old scars, new floaters.... I discussed knitting techniques with my fellow patients. Every female patient and staff member could knit! At one point, as I was sticking my tongue out at a few fallen stitches, a Chinese lady snatched the offending sample out of my hands and speedily corrected my mistakes. She was gone as quickly as she had appeared, so I followed her direction into the adjoining waiting room, but it was empty. It was late evening by now, and I snagged a friendly nurse to ask after the Chinese patient. "She's not a patient!" scoffed the nurse. "She's our visiting doctor from China." I mumbled something to her retreating back, but she suddenly re-appeared with the doctor! I think I blushed but the doctor (Ching) just tut-tutted and sorted out more mistakes. She had met me once before; I, sans contact lenses, had not recognised her. We stayed chatting awhile about me learning Mandarin (Ni hao! Wo jaio Shai!) and her mother's knitting expertise at home in Beijing, until my blue-eyed surgeon (the one who reads my blog) hustled his visiting doctor back to the safe seclusion of work. I floated back to the receptionist's desk and three nurses manifested, discussing the merits of crocheting and Carmen, head nurse, asked if I knew how to cast off. She had just begun the lesson when my medical ophthalmologist shimmered into view. (A quick visual image for you - he looks a little like Robin Williams' character in Good Will Hunting. Beard, eccentricity and all). "I know knitting is far more important," he seethed, "but could I have my patient back?" I scuttled after him, and when we'd settled into the ghostly dark room, he griped, "I feel as though I'm running a creche for adults here!"

So there you have it. I am knitting and pearling and learning Mandarin (which brings me back to my friend Jeanne-ming!) and awaiting the next installment of an IV drip. There are two more weddings looming, one which is about to fall on my birthday. So I shall write about the serendipity of that as it occurs.

So much love to my blogging sangha x

first painting: henrietta mabel may, 1884-1971
second painting: nichiro ishimura, 1946-97

Skeletons of War

The thing about skin
is its ability to break,

bruise, even
bend around things.

Bones need skin,

for a while.

Without skin

bones have no face,

but skin leaves

without a trace -

bones stay forever.

The colour of race

is thin skin,

veins,

a soft, changeable glaze,

a passing karmic phase;

but bones remain,

on land, in land,

bones stake their claim.

Zimbabwe's bones are colourless

structures of the earth.

Injustices preserved

can wait patiently for years.

But bones breathe.

Bones will speak

and their stories

will be heard.

-© Shaista Tayabali, 2010

a re-post for dverse poetics
Chenjerai Mutasa, Zimbabwean sculptor, recently created a five-work piece with Biblical and Rastafarian connotations called Future Seed. The sculptures are made from found objects, used materials, depicting the interaction between the living and the dead, and the bridges of healing.
The politics of Zimbabwe are too sensitive and complex for any poem of mine to fathom but this wrote itself soon after I watched Mugabe and the White African. There have been so many farms and lives lost in the violent 'land re-distribution' policies of the last ten years; what transfixes the viewer is the dignity of Mike Campbell and his son-in-law Ben Freeth. It cuts through terror and fear and beatings and translates through race and time until all you hear, all you remember, is the sound of a land worth loving, struggling and dying for.

Missing the Bouquet, Avoiding the Crush

My glass shall not persuade me I am old,

So long as youth and thou are of one date;

- Sonnet 22, Shakespeare

The first wedding I ever attended was when I was five years old. It was exciting. New dress. I felt important. It was dramatic too - my younger brother, in his excitement, slipped off the sofa he was jumping on, fell against a glass table and cut open the skin near his eye. He was three; he still bears the scar. A memorable first wedding.

I couldn't have known it would be two decades before my next weddings, and then they would come in a rush. Something about that alarming age of thirty. All girlish things at an end and boys no longer the annoying presences in classrooms but worse, future husbands to be obeyed and cherished. I don't know if there is something wrong with me (apart from the hungry Wolf of course) but I don't seem to be able to see him anymore. And when they (the blushing brides) throw the dreaded bouquet over their shoulders, it's all I can do not to run and hide. Maybe I am a coward. But why would anyone want to catch a bride's bouquet? Why??

Husband, if you're out there, you have to find me. And if I am old and grey and full of sleep, it will be entirely your fault.

Meantime, I am enjoying the turbulent freedom of the uncaught bouquets - that deliciously silly teenage phenomenon called Crush. And it's on an actor (eight years younger than me), playing a vampire (eighty years older than me), frozen in time, at the tender age of seventeen... (confused?) and so what if we can never meet? This crush too shall pass, and fast, but not the freedom that goes with it.

And tomorrow, a hen party extravaganza at Chatsworth, where the BBC filmed Pride and Prejudice. You know, the place where Mr Darcy leaps out of his cotton whites and into the (probably freezing) water? Sigh.. literary noblemen, literary vampires, literary perfection... what more does a woman want, thirty years old or not?

The Cloths of Heaven

On his birthday my father says
his wishes have come true.

He asked for our happiness, and lo, the cloth was embroidered in just such a way.

He asked that love would come as it had for him, and it did, and his youngest son married with just such a love, and to his beloved three children is added a fourth. (Father always wanted five children... one more marriage should do the trick, but two more would be even better!)

He hoped our paths would weave right and true, that our feet would walk on the carpet of our dreams, and lo, the weave is more magical than he dreamed, and he surfs and rides the wave with us, our inextricable traveller and guide.




This is my favourite portrait of Dad -
done by Mum in a style she reserved just for him.

And the Yeats' poem that inspires it all.

Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,

Enwrought with golden and silver light,

The blue and the dim and the dark cloths

Of night and light and the half-light,

I would spread the cloths under your feet:

But I, being poor, have only my dreams;

I have spread my dreams under your feet;

Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

The Gifts of Time

The Gifts of Time
pile neatly around my soul
not the Christmas
and birthday time gifts
but the abstract fruits
of kindness, harmony,
friendship and trust;
the Invisibility Cloaks
of a lucky lifetime.

And what about the little regrets?
The unbought thing
the unvisited place
the unspoken, unwritten word?
All tuck away neatly
in the Great Pockets of Time
awaiting another explorer.

The songs I have not sung
stream merrily from another's lips
And dreams someone else has spun
dance a tango on my hips.

The Gifts of Time
are the funny miracles
of quick escapes and
quicker encounters
down narrow lanes
and atop mountains;

there the voices speak
there the souls gather

and sing.




I wrote this poem on my last night in Sing. I read it to Dad a few days ago, here in Shelford, and he said it captured his own experience exactly. He had been feeling regretful, of all the things he had not seen, the places, the people's faces. The holiday he could have had, if the fates were different, had been playing on his mind. Then this poem, and suddenly he seems to have relaxed. It is not the nature of regret that he dwells on anymore, but the gifts that were his. The dancing! He danced with my mother on the first day we arrived and he never really stopped. Now that is a gift of a lucky lifetime.

Shangri-La

The days pass me by. And I forget to write.

This is the floating world, the Great Artist's Illusion, a dream that is more real to me than the last ten years have been.

I don't pinch myself. I don't need to remind myself to be here, to remember. I am here with every fibre of my being.

I am in the Garden City. My eyes trail bouganvillea, birds of paradise, frangipani everywhere, orange embellishments weaving in between cars, buildings, people.

I am on the sand, in the sea, swimming in the rain.

There were white butterflies at the wedding. There were two yellow butterflies dancing on the angels at the white washed Armenian Church. There are thunderstorms and smiling friendly faces.

As the Singaporeans say.... "Happiness, can? Can! Can can can!!"

My brother had asked me to write something for the wedding, but I found it impossible to do so while in England. An hour before the ceremony though, on the beach, with the sea singing in my ears, I wrote and later recited the following words...

An Island Marriage

We pray for rain sometimes

Sometimes we pray for sun

In between the heavens dance

This game was all for fun

How but in tears and laughter

Can two families become one?

Here by the rocks and butterflies

Here where the palm trees blow

Here our hearts are cradled

by a love that continues to grow

A love lapped by the seas of time

from the Phillipines to Japan

across English borders

towards Indian shores

We gather our prayers together

and send our blessings forwards

to our beautiful married couple

the beloved wedded ones

to my brother and my sister

Maria-Theresa and Irfan.

On the Cusp of Knowing

The whole village knows. Yesterday at our friend Victoria's summer lunch party, the impending wedding of a Tayabali son danced from lip to lip like a happy cabbage butterfly drunk on nectar and petal.

Everyone loves a good holiday chat, and who doesn't love a wedding when it isn't theirs to plan?

I danced around, much like that butterfly, in startling green shoes, green hat and a mega watt smile, chirping and twittering and offering green guacamole on toast.

When I tired, I snuck into the conservatory, and drank sweet tea under a bower of bougainvillea. Green and flowers are my battery chargers and I soon flitted out again.

I am making place cards with dried flowers. I find myself greedily eyeing Other People's flowers and rather avariciously creeping my fingers towards said flowers before my mother smacks my fingers away. I am taking England with me - bluebells and daisies, forget-me-nots, primula, sage and lovage. I wish I could take the wisteria. It has never looked lovelier, bloomier; thick with purple scent, dripping with promise, the wisteria is on the cusp of knowing.

Down by the Vicarage, the wisteria are just as beautiful. It has been the home of my father's dear friend Ralph for many years. It boasts one of the most artistic and carefully tended gardens, and there Ralph decided to end his days. The cancer came fast and hit hard, and my father misses the aimless tuneful whistling that burst out of Ralph every time he left our house. "Goodbye, Cho!" he'd say to my father. "Goodbye kid!" he'd say to my mother.

Weddings and whistlings goodbye. It is ever thus.

Where the Frangipani Blows, Only the Cobweb Knows

Feels like rain

hot and cool

swathes of muslin breeze

pour silently

into me

Until thunder comes

and my heart breaks open

great cascades tumble

Out,

where the blue skies

reign

and I am no longer
a prisoner of pain.

19th of May. Ten days since I last wrote. My subscribers and followers are dropping like flies! Should I apologise? I am including a watercolour by my father and an oil on canvas by my mother to make amends. I have been back into hospital for the second round of monoclonals, this time without the supplementary treatment of immunoglobulins. And my body is not happy. I feel frail and fragile and temporary. I am a piece of cheese being grated by a very thorough hand. I am grains of gritty sand.

I am also the sister of a brother about to be wedded. Did I tell you? The wedding that was supposed to happen last year was derailed by my hospital adventures. And now, here it is, almost upon us. Ten days before I leave for a hot hot country. Ten days before I leave these cobwebs behind and find a frangipani me.

Ma

At the worst, the very worst
You are there
When the mirror breaks
and my heart,
You ache
and your aching
heals me.

When I can never be right
and my scars illuminate
You perceive me
perfect and whole.

No words.

There are no words.
Only time, passing,
and Love,
that ever presence,
holding us close.


- Shaista



Maaaaaaaa!!!!!!!
Happy Mother's Day, beautiful, talented Perveen - the one who makes it all possible.
Without you, nothing.

With you, every day is Mother's Day :)

Orange

Orange
has many shades

It is the colour of change

Orange is what you feel

in a flirty skirt

and golden gladiator sandals.

Orange makes love

with her spirit

Has her own chakra

Turns cartwheels

on a national flag.

Can be eaten

by the dozen

in Haiti, on a hot day,

as you climb miles

of dusty track

to visit a dying child.

Orange can save your life.

Sometimes, very rarely

Orange

can be misunderstood

misused, even abused.

Whose eyes are these
that cannot see

the aura of good?

Not the ones concealed

beneath

the complementary black hood.

The list of requirements
is simple.
You have to hate.

Declare yourself an Agent

of the Enemy of the State.

Then wait

for the bombs to detonate,

while the detainees contemplate

Who hates who

more?

Just so you know

I am thinking of you

Brothers of the Bay

in your isolated cages

in your suffocating spaces

I am trying to free you

I am trying to believe in you

Orange.

Poem, copyright 2010, Shaista