Not always on my head.

Unrequited.

The moon is like a woman this evening, beautifully incomplete. 
She is just a smudge of white in a sky of blue and grey and
eucalyptus treetops.  Below her, predators soar and swoop, and I,
I who am in love with these bad boys of the sky, I walk, and I sing
love songs to the kites as they fly.  I sing and I think they hear me,
four of them, because they come to where I am and fly only above me,
lower and lower, leaving the rest of the sky to the rest of their family,
other kites, and to more distant relatives:  bright green parakeets
on double dates, shrieking in delight as they hurry towards
the setting sun, crows crossing over, pigeons going nowhere.

I sing the higher harmony of Beatles’ songs, although I am an alto
and a smoker, because I think that the kites may hear better
a higher pitch that is closer to their own tremulous whistle.
I can see their claws, and the rips in their feathered profiles,
 leftovers from their victories and defeats.  I lose myself
in them, in their dark silhouettes, in every turn of their heads
and subtle shift of their tail feathers.  I cannot believe that
they are only scouting for food to snatch from my hands,
because I am here every evening, holding a lighter, a phone,
a pencil or a notebook, sometimes lifting a cigarette or
a bottle of water to my lips, and they have never swooped down
for these.  I know they can’t understand the words I sing, but
 I like to think that they can sense the feelings:  awe, wonder,
infatuation, envy.

Above us, she shines, but dimly.  It is not her time yet.  She peeps
out from behind grey muslin cloud every now and then, flashing
for a few moments the brilliant beauty she is not yet ready to share.
Across the sky, the sun is sinking.  Some days he goes down
with a roar, setting fire to the clouds around him, turning
green treetops to glowing embers.  Today though, he settles down
so quietly I do not notice he is going until I hear the call
 to maghrib* prayer.  I think he has understood her need to sing
this evening, and he knows that she will not sing as long as
he stands before her, she cannot reveal her song to a sky
that is not yet quite hers, and so he exits silently and with grace.

The kites have flown away, back to their rain trees, all but one,
who sits on top of a fir tree like a dark Christmas angel.  I gaze
up at him, forgetting to sing my own songs, hoping that
he sees me and feels me, but he never once turns his head
in my direction.  It is not me or my song that he waits for,
I realise.  He too has been waiting for her.  

I sigh and tear my eyes away from him to lift them even higher,
up to her.  The sun has gone and a wind breathes gently
close to her so that the clouds drift away from her face,
and it is such a beautiful face to see it makes my heart ache.
I look back at the kite, and I know he sees her too.  And in
that moment I think that he knows I know, because the next second
he is gone, like every bad boy after a sharing too unexpectedly intimate.  

A tiny bat scuttles across the twilight, and above her, the moon
takes a deep breath.  I feel that she does not need my audience tonight,
so I turn and head downstairs.  Tomorrow will do.  I will be back,
and so will she, and so will my dark angel.

* maghrib - at sunset, the fourth of five daily prayers asked of Muslims by God

Why I walk the roof.

I could barely manage to describe what I saw yesterday, with
the kites. How can I begin to describe the sky? It doesn't matter
 if it's not over a beautiful lake or an ocean, mountain or forest.
It is just as beautiful when it blankets a city infested with
humanity's ugliness. Clumsy buildings, piles of garbage,
cell network towers and black cables zigzagging all over
can't  touch it. Even photography won't do it justice (and mine
is off my phone camera)! But even a simple phone cam
can't hide how amazing it is.

Clouds spread out to dry after a rain?

Big heavy rain clouds that sometimes get blown away

A distant golden pyramid, or a snowtipped mountain? Cloud catching the sunset, and my imagination.

And as I walk, the sky keeps changing

The colours deepen or melt

The clouds shift and evolve in the wind's hands

 I'm supposed to be up there burning calories but it is more than
my exercise hour, it's a time of worship.

Almost indescribable.

The sky does things to me. Today it almost made me weep, it was
so magical and awesome (in the true sense of that word, not the one
that's accompanied by "dude").

I was up on the roof for my evening walk (down 2 kg, people!)
and suddenly the sky over the nearby graveyard was filled with kites.
The kites I saw today were all pariah kites - their feathers more grey
than brown, not the woody rust wingspan and white head of the Brahmani kite. 

The graveyard is an old British one, with enormous rain trees
and mahogany trees. The kites live in the rain trees. They were all
up in the air, soaring, gliding, sometimes even seeming to defy
gravity:  struggling to stay still against some invisible air current.
It was magnificent. I couldn't keep walking, I just had to lift my
head and watch them. My neck ached but I could not stop, it was
as though I had connected with them.

Suddenly they were swooping one by one right above me,
just about 25 feet over my head. I could see their feathers
ruffling in the wind, could see their heads pivot this way
and that. It was as if they knew I was there, that I envied them
their flight, and they shared the experience with me as best
as they knew how. They saw that I saw them, really saw them,
and so they came to see me. I felt so honoured, and humbled.
And so, so blessed.

As I watched, the call to prayer rose from nearby mosques,
and it struck me that just like the men bowing their heads
to the floor, perhaps these kites were offering up their
evening prayer too, their flight some outpouring of unbearable
joy - for the beauty of the sky around them,
for the oranges and purples and peaches of the sinking sunlight,
for the crisp wind, for the ability to fly, for life!

Watching them, and the majesty of the sky, I suddenly felt
as though the pariah here was me.

It's here again.

Just as pretty as when they're on roses.

I do miss breathing in that glorious warm sun-kissed scent off my laundry, but the monsoon has its own delights. This year, the rain starts earlier in the day, often in the afternoon. I quite like it, even though my laundry takes two days to dry on my balcony, instead of two hours up on the terrace. It feels like a real monsoon this time, although I'm not sure what the meteorologists and farmers would say.

Today we had a wonderful downpour - the type that's a little bit scary, but no real threat. It was glorious. The trees get very happy. The traffic, not so much. Like the Thieves' Downfall in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the monsoon washes away all deception, exposing the half-hearted and half-pocketed roadworks contracts for what they are:  more sand, less tar; more words, less deeds. Unfortunately, once the rains are gone, it will probably be the same people getting paid to patch up their own botched jobs, and equally unfortunately, by the time the next municipal elections come around, the citizens will probably have forgotten the gigantic pot holes and hours-long traffic jams, in their excitement over free sarees, promised housing and suddenly-fallen petrol prices. Muggles.

Me, I just stay put in the shelter of my balcony with a cup of hot tea, a little yellow bird, and my damp laundry, and try to focus on the raindrops.

A something of dragonflies

A flock? A herd? A swarm? I stood among them, and they buzzed inches above and around me, each with their own little Pause button. It was unreal and magical to lift my head up to the sky and become part of this buzzing and moving, for suddenly that was all there was. For a moment, that was the whole world.

He stops, shocked -- recalls
a time when he breathed fire -- then
Dragonfly flies on.

 In Native American story, Dragonfly was once Dragon, before Coyote tricked him into losing his magic, by playing on his pride. Dragonfly symbolises a change, moving away from illusion toward reality. When Dragonfly comes to me, he's saying, "Something needs to change."

I first noticed the dragonflies seven years ago, which is when I wrote that haiku. At times, I look back on a flamboyant and somewhat delinquent past, and my present seems stodgy and dull in comparison:  middle-aged. And then I'm reassured when I remember that there's a reason why dragons are extinct - or more realistically, just a myth - and that the earth needs her dragonflies.

Why they fly

I wrote this back in 2008. Not sure why or how it ended up in my Drafts folder, but when I tried to repost it, it appears with today's date (new format on blogger.com that I've yet to master).

I was attending a wonderful workshop on appreciating poetry run by my friend Wendy, and she mentioned a poem by Thomas Hardy, called The Darkling Thrush. We didn't get to read the poem, but what I understood of the poem was that it was about a thrush singing in a desolate landscape, and the poet wondering why.

Later, when I sat down to dinner, dissecting my spaghetti bolognaise and a somewhat irksome poem by Yeats, this suddenly came to me:

They have no knowledge
of all we doubt, or question.
So they sing, and fly.


I thought perhaps I should read Mr. Hardy's poem before presumptuously posting my own response to it, so I googled it and found an interesting review, as well as the poem itself. I hope you will read the link I've provided. It's incredibly beautiful, savour each word, each line. I can hardly believe that these words are written by the same man who wrote those stern novels with tedious descriptions of architecture for literature students to agonise over. Oh, such beautiful wise use of words .. I'm so jealous, so inspired, so moved. But I'm also relieved to find that my little haiku doesn't jar against what Mr. Hardy said.

The moon wanes

The moon wanes
parchment yellow in an inky sky.
Crisp with age, come upon suddenly
like an old love-letter I never meant
to read again.

#

(Written on 24/9/1994 at 9:05 pm)

"If you love me ..

If you love me
you should know
how the full moon
fills my eyes and my heart.
You should know,
so when we are apart
you have only to look up
when the moon is full,
and we shall be together.

#

(written in 2002?)

This poem is written for four little boys, sons of a friend, four little boys that I love dearly but lost to time and distance. When I left Bahrain, I told them to look up whenever there was a full moon, and they would know that wherever I was in the world, I would be looking up at it too, and thinking of them, sending all my love soaring up to the moon so it would bounce back downwards to them.

By now they are teenagers and adults, but I hope they do remember whenever they catch sight of a full moon. And I wait for it every month, and send them my love, and soak up the light of theirs. My four lovely little boys - Hisham, Abdullah, Sameer and Shishi - held tight in my heart for always.

(post-script 2010: they found me on Facebook. And they remember.)

Before the monsoon

There are days like this. When I feel dry, bare, buffeted.
All around her, the others still wear green; this tree is out of sync
with the seasons. She follows some other rhythm, some African beat
that only she hears. Her pods have been emptied of their cellophane seeds,
ransacked by wild parakeets and squirrels. When they fall, these pods
look like canoes. But though the skies are grey and the wind promises rain,
it lies, and so the canoes rot slowly in the graveyard at her feet.

P.S. This is an African flame tree that grows at the edge of the graveyard behind our terrace.