right through the alphabet from a to z,
from first to last, from bad to worse and worser
and the very worst you could muster.
I learned the curses. I learned the curser.
So proper you looked in your nice shoes and suit
until you produced Language like magic
out of your mouth and I was impressed
and oh I fell for you arse over tits
and when I said so you laughed like a drain
and we blinded and swore like the daft buggers
we were, all the way down Clerkenwell
and all the way up on the train
to the Horseshoe Pass.
And I tell you, since you went it’s a pain
in the arse, and when some days I feel like shit
or when I say that I feel flat, I swear
I hear you laugh like a drain.
Not just flat, Mrs, Flat as a witch’s tit,
that’s what you say. Flat
as a witch’s tit.
IMTIAZ DHARKER
Presents from my Aunts in Pakistan
They sent me a salwar kameez
peacock-blue,
and another
glistening like an orange split open,
embossed slippers, gold and black
points curling.
Candy-striped glass bangles
snapped, drew blood.
Like at school, fashions changed
in Pakistan –
the salwar bottoms were broad and stiff,
then narrow.
My aunts chose an apple-green sari,
silver-bordered
for my teens.
I tried each satin-silken top –
was alien in the sitting room.
I could never be as lovely
as those clothes –
I longed
for denim and corduroy.
My costume clung to me
and I was aflame,
I couldn’t rise up out of its fire,
half-English,
unlike Aunt Jamila.
I wanted my parents’ camel-skin lamp –
switching it on in my bedroom,
to consider the cruelty
and the transformation
from camel to shade,
marvel at the colours
like stained glass.
My mother cherished her jewellery –
Indian gold, dangling, filigree,
But it was stolen from our car.
The presents were radiant in my wardrobe.
My aunts requested cardigans
from Marks and Spencers.
My salwar kameez
didn’t impress the schoolfriend
who sat on my bed, asked to see
my weekend clothes.
But often I admired the mirror-work,
tried to glimpse myself
in the miniature
glass circles, recall the story
how the three of us
sailed to England.
Prickly heat had me screaming on the way.
I ended up in a cot
in my English grandmother’s dining-room,
found myself alone,
playing with a tin boat.
I pictured my birthplace
from fifties’ photographs.
When I was older
there was conflict, a fractured land
throbbing through newsprint.
Sometimes I was Lahore –
my aunts in shaded rooms,
screened from male visitors,
sorting presents,
wrapping them in tissue.
Or there were beggars, sweeper-girls
and I was there
of no fixed nationality,
staring through fretwork
at the Shalimar Gardens.
MONIZA ALVI
Seed
The first warm day of spring
and I step out into the garden from the gloom
of a house where hope had died
to tally the storm damage, to seek what may
have survived. And finding some forgotten
lupins I’d sown from seed last autumn
holding in their fingers a raindrop each
like a peace offering, or a promise,
I am suddenly grateful and would
offer a prayer if I believed in God.
But not believing, I bless the power of seed,
its casual, useful persistence,
and bless the power of sun,
its conspiracy with the underground,
and thank my stars the winter’s ended.
PAULA MEEHAN
The Singer
A weekday haar.
The boats are out to sea
in a radio stasis, physical and stilled
between the water and unending sky.
It’s late in the afternoon; it’s holiday:
they’ve set the fair up at the harbour’s edge
amongst the lobster creels and fishing nets,
matching the reds of marker buoys and floats
with scarlet bulbs and candied apple-skins.
The rides look pale and quiet in the grey
of four o’clock, and most are stalled, or vacant,
waiting for the night and mystery.
On days like these the fair is mostly refuge:
the booths at the pier-end lit against the fog
like one of those chalk-coloured prints that Harunobu
committed to paper so fine it seems
intangible, a pop song from the sixties
working against the foghorn’s steady bass
like tinselwork.
On days like these
the one thing that never ends is the expectancy
of standing in the haar and listening
for stars on their crystal axis, or the slide
of nightfall, like the whisper in the strands
of coloured lights around the carousel.
The singer is lost in a web
of speakers and wires, and voices from the quay,
but now and then she rises through it all,
her voice like a thread I keep
losing and finding again, though I’m never quite sure
if it’s love she intends, or loss, or a moment’s
angry hosanna.
At sea
the stillness thickens, charged with idle boats
and schools of fishes swimming in the blur
of memory, or joy, or what it is
to happen in the hurry of a world
that ebbs and flows like song, or given light,
against the random static of the dark.
JOHN BURNSIDE
On the Roof of the World
‘Hey Jude’ was the longest single, up to that time,
ever released. It sweats off, chorus like a mantra.
The times are changing. New musics divide the audience
and skirts are longer, but it’s a bright London shopping day
when the traffic stops. Only a black cab moves
gingerly through the crowd, like a toy cruiser nudging weed,
and we’re all craning upwards: planks and scaffolding
on the townhouse roof and the clipped, drifting music
the Beatles play. It is their last concert,
though nobody knows this. George twangs his Fender, John
hammers-off on his Epiphone, Paul stomps
with his violin-bodied fretless bass and Ringo, dreamed up
by a manager who died a long time ago, kicks the years
out of his bass drum padded with a rug. How sweet
it would have been, someone will write, to watch them
play the Marquee, this funky little rock’n’roll band.
They are so far above us, we can hardly see them.
They are playing for God. They are playing for cameras
because the sho
w’s outgrown the road. We can’t believe it.
Tomorrow’s papers will acclaim a British institution.
I’ll read them and imagine I was there like everyone.
They are already going out of fashion. There’s nothing left
but acrimony, separation, lawsuits. The last great single,
‘The Ballad of John and Yoko’, will be John and Paul
alone, hurrying in midsummer heat, the way it was at the start.
Nobody knows this. They have climbed too far to get back
anywhere we might be among the crowd who clap then drift apart
when the helmeted bobbies have the amps turned off.
LACHLAN MACKINNON
The Wife of Bath Speaks in Brixton Market
My life is my own bible
wen it come to all de woes
in married life
fah since I reach twelve,
Tanks to Eternal Gawd,
is five husban I have
(if dat is passible)
but all of dem was wort someting
in dem own way
doah dem say
dat troo Jesas only go to one weddin
in Canaan
we no suppose fi married
more dan once
but den again
dem say Im tell de Samaritan woman
by de well
dat doah she did have five husban
de laas one never count
is wat Im mean by dat
why jus de fif one lef out
ow much she can have den
four?
Im don’t give no precise number
Well,
people can argue it forever
but me sure of one serious ting
Im order we to sex an multiply
Im also say dat
de man mus lef im madda an im fadda
an cling to me
but Im never say
how many
mi no hear no mention of bigamy
or polygamy
so why me or anyone
should tink it is a crime
An wat about de wise king Soloman
look how much wife im tek, Lawd,
ah wish ah did have as much in bed as him!
God mus did give him some ‘great’ gif
No one alive did ever have such fun
But still
I will tank de Lawd
fah doah I have only five
I shall welcome de sixt one
wenever im choose to arrive
because I nat lacking up my foot at all
if one husban dead
anadda christian man will surely come
fah even de apostle say dat den mi free
to tek anadda man dat can please me
betta to married dan to bun
Abraham, Joseph,
nuff adda holy man
did have nuff wife
Whey God forbid dat?
Yuh see no clear word?
Where Im ever order virginity?
Dere is no such commandment!
is de apostle Paul come talk bout maidenhead
an him never qualify fi talk bout dat.
Im say a man may counsel a woman
but counselling is nat command
wat I do wid my body is my personal business
an if God did command virginity
nobady wouldn married
fah married woulda dead
an no more pickney wouldn born
so no new maidenhead.
How Paul him want to tek command
wen Jesas wouldn dweet
we all know pum pum is someting sweet
an nuff sword will falla it.
Whoever, jus like de apostle,
want to do widdouten sex
is free to choose dat,
but wid we, no badda vex
fah if my husban wear out an im dead
you free to marry me
dat is nat bigamy
an to enjoy good sex
is nat a frailty
nat unless yuh did decide, like Paul,
fi tek up chastity
because a man don’t want pure gold pot
in im house
im want some mek wid good wood
as a spouse
an God did give we all a different gif
we choose wat we is suited for
everyone don’t have to give up everyting fah Christ
Im neva aks we dat
dat is fah who want perfect peace
an you all know already
dat is nat me
I gwine mek de bes of all my years
fah dat is de joy an fruit of marriage
an why we have dese private parts so sweet
dem cyan jus mek so an don’t put to use
except to piss
or tell man apart from woman
das wat you tink?
fram wat me feel already
dat could nat be so
a man mus give im wife er tings
Piss yes, an tell we apart
but wat pleasure dese instrument brings!
JEAN ‘BINTA’ BREEZE
From Dublin to Ramallah
for Ghassan Zaqtan
Because they would not let you ford the river Jordan
and travel here to Dublin, I stop this postcard in its tracks –
before it reaches your sealed-up letterbox, before yet another checkpoint,
before the next interrogation even begins.
And instead of a postcard, I post you a poem of water.
Subterranean subterfuge,
an indolent element that slides across borders,
as boundaries are eroded by the fluency of tongues.
I send you a watery bulletin from the underwater backroom
of Bewley’s Oriental Café,
my hands tinted by stainedglass light as I write,
near windows thickened with rain.
I ship you the smoked astringency of Formosa Lapsang Souchong
and a bun with a tunnel of sweet almond paste
set out on a chipped pink marble-topped table,
from the berth of a high-backed red-plush settle.
I greet you from the ranks of the solitary souls of Dublin,
fetched up over dinner with the paper for company.
Closer to home and to exile,
the waters will rise from their source.
I give you the Liffey in spate.
Drenched, relentless, the soaked November clouds
settle a torrent of raindrops
to fatten the flood.
Puddles pool into lakes, drains burst their sides,
and each granite pavement’s slick rivulet has the purpose of gravity.
Wet, we are soaking in order to float.
Dogs in the rain: the cream double-decker buses steam up and stink
of wet coats and wet shopping,
a steep river of buses plying the Liffey;
the big circumnavigations swing in from the suburbs, turn,
cluster in the centre, back off once more.
Closer to home and to exile:
I seek for this greeting the modesty of rainwater,
the wet from ordinary clouds
that darkens the soil, swells reservoirs, curls back
the leaves of open books on a damp day into rows of tsunami,
and, once in a while, calls for a song.
I ask for a liquid dissolution:
let borders dissolve, let words dissolve,
let English absorb the fluency of Arabic, with ease,
let us speak in wet tongues.
Look, the Liffey is full of itself. So I post it
to Ramallah, to meet up with the Jordan,
as the Irish Sea swells into the Mediterranean,
letting the Liffey
dive down beneath bedrock
swelling the limestone aquifer from Hebron to Jenin,
plumping
each cool porous cell with good Irish rain.
If you answer the phone, the sea at Killiney
will sound throughout Palestine.
If you put your head out the window (avoiding the snipers, please)
a cloud will rain rain from the Liffey
and drench all Ramallah, drowning the curfew.
Sweet water will spring from your taps for chai bi nana
and not be cut off.
Ghassan, please blow up that yellow inflatable dinghy stored
in your roof,
dust off your compass,
bring all friends,
and swim through the borders from Ramallah to Dublin.
SARAH MAGUIRE
The Women of Mumbles Head
The moon is sixpence,
a pillar of salt or
a shoal of herring.
But on such a night,
wild as the wet wind,
larger than life,
she casts a long line
over the slippery sea.
And the women of Mumbles Head
are one, a long line,
over the slippery sea.
Wet clothes clog them,
heavy ropes tire them,
but the women of Mumbles Head
are one, a long line,
over the slippery sea.
And under white beams
their strong arms glisten,
like silver, like salt,
like a shoal of herring,
under the slippery sea.
And they haul
for their dear ones,
and they call
for their dear ones,
casting a long line
over the slippery sea.
But the mounting waves
draw from them,
the mountain waves
draw from them,
the bodies of their dear ones,
O, the bodies of their dear ones,
drawn under the slippery sea.
In a chain of shawls
they hook one in,
fish-wet, moonlit,
they’ve plucked him back
from under the slippery sea.
For the moon is sixpence,
a pillar of salt
or a shoal of herring,
The Map and the Clock Page 43
