Late spring-summer 2024 poetry

A mini anthology

Spring, post-birthday, brought with it rare emotional tenderness. Something about being in a new place allows you to approach old memories, tentatively.

I bought a tiny air orchid and lavished it with love and orchid feed. Watched a hand of light work its way around the kitchen like a timid sundial, as I continue to observe the first 365 days in an unfamiliar home.

I see flowers and trees and sunsets as poetry, not image. I find myself composing haikus on the spot, jotting down verses on the bus or the moment I wake up.

Feelings never come naturally, but somehow a tiny flower can make me cry.

Here’s a small anthology of everything I’ve been swimming in recently. It’s just for me, and it’s all about me, but you’re welcome to take a dip inside my head.

Transnational orchid
05.04.2024

Like you, transnational orchid,

I am
culturally uprouted, aerially rooted,
drinking life from all around.
I wouldn’t graft if you even forced me.

Community is my terroir.

Walking to the station in springtime
18:54 23.04.2024

The whole world in my
fingertips, for just one breath.
Exhale, spring has passed.

Contemplating the tenacity of wisteria in my mother’s garden
03.05.2024

On her last breath I’ll
unclasp her hands, promise to
water her garden.

Husk
19.05.2024

People admire my books, my clothes,
my records, my scarves, but they don’t know
that everything beautiful that I own, you
once gave to me.

Without you now they’re artefacts
of expired worth, costly bric-a-brac
that I dogear, drag and scratch and snag
to rinse my memory.

Without you now I cannot claim to
be original in any way. My
every thought, my cadence of phrase
is molded by your shape.

Without you now I drape my scarf. It
swerves to escape my winnowing frame.
A spring breeze causes me to sway;
an embellished, hollow husk.

Lamentation for a fallen baby orchid
20.05.2024

I never cried at
a lifetime of flushed zygotes
the way I mourn you.

Towards ochre-ness (finding a ginkgo tree, contemplating youthful vanity)
27.05.2024

If only you knew
how resplendent you will be
in your autumn years.

Day 221
02.06.2024

In that first year
when I was finding suntraps
in my new house
I wonder,

Were you bleaching the shadows
of our once shared home?

19:59 21.06.2024

There must be a word
for the blooming grief one feels
after the solstice.

New orchids

16.06.24
Forgive me, I lost faith in you.
Fourteen fresh blossoms 
in CIF lemon cream
one day curdled to a toilet rim ochre.
Every bud scant a gram
dropping
shattering
blood curdling screams.

26.10.19
I felt your hand un-live.
No vitality left to grip.
Without a squeeze you permitted me
to withdraw my hand
I’m sorry I think - I recall - I let go too soon.
I hope you could still hear me say
it’s ok to go, it’s ok please go.

01.07.24
My eyes were closed when I woke up
to the imperceptible sound of
new orchids singing their dawn chorus.
There you were, all along.

Father daughter un-holy ghost.

Caterpillar saṃsāra, after Chuang Tzu
23.07.2024

I thought I was a butterfly
who dreamed she was a girl.
Now she is the girl 
dreaming I am a pupa.

Let me wait here in the wings,
unwinged so she can’t fly
too close to the searing light.

Some people dream of flight.
She dreams in suspension—

Reborn again to be unborn again.
Rebirth herself to unbirth myself.

Metamorph, is I.

Lost time
18.08.2024

Day’s heat receding.
River breeze fans our fast tongues,
skating on lost time.

Conversational
lacuna. We pause on the 
past, in the past. Stuck.

How have eighteen years
passed by? I commit your eyes
to formaldehyde.

“Remember MySpace?”
“Time moves so fast.” “Forty soon.”
We hug, falter, laugh.

Next time I see you
crows will claw at both our eyes.
“Remember that night?”

When my heart feels full, 
loneliness accelerates.
Trips me the next day.

Late summer malaise
24.08.2024

Mustard leaf helicopters from the sky
Piquant stain on sunbleached grass
Estival kinetosis

Gazing on the waning gibbous
Searching for a new love’s touch
Longing for an old love’s nudge

Pruning a marcescent heart
No hope for a dessicated garden
70% illumination

Wake encrusted in his sleep dust
Waiting on the harvest moon
Laundry still takes a while to dry

Late summer malaise
Spleen and stomach dampening
Summer rain falls a touch too late

Ink and blood
28.08.2024

Old book peels open to a yellow page.
Scarred and pockmarked with
highlights and annotations.
I scour them—these palm lines—
these expired divinations.
A sudden smudge; the page leaks
with unforetold grief, with disbelief
that these words dare survive
when he has died.

Strange that this dull ink remains
when all his blood and skin and bones
we returned to sea. Now sand and ash,
soon mud and clay, sedimenting into
next century’s stone.
Where blood became water,
and water air, he
unwrote himself in the halcyon sky.

I hide his writing in messy piles
around the house​: on envelopes,
tickets, luggage tags, receipts
so that I may surprise myself on
random days—​a letter? oh! who could it be?—

Tracing the words with forensic hope to
excavate one skin cell left behind.
To keep under my nail a piece of him
to claim as mine.
A piece of him that made me, me. 
I want to shoot this faded biro
into my veins, its ink transfusing
with my blood. So that, one day,
my fingers autotype
the words he couldn’t say, “I love...
you,”

Here! Our writing’s side by side.
When did mine become the spit
of his doctor’s scribe? I don’t recall
a prescriptive, masculine, white collar sprawl.
Though I’m starting to realise that
we’re all lined up in the queue
of life’s grand print job—our destiny—to
become the people who wrote us alive.
(Observe how our eyebrows and fingers gnarl
in crooked likeness to the family tree.
Or how my brother’s sneeze can shake the doors
the way my daddy’s would sweep the floors.)

There’s no choose-your-own-ending,
no write-your-own-story.
We put on their blood, their skin, their bones
until one day we also die.
Our ash will meet in the halcyon sky.
All that remains are notebooks scarred
with dashed out verses in scraggly cursive.
My poetry, indecipherable from his.
This ink, our blood, joined up at last.

Late summer sadness
01.09.2024

Autumn arrives before it’s due.
A drizzle of leaves beneath my feet
in undid pleats and sunscorched hues
makes me look up and there they are.

There you always were.

Two resplendent ginkgo trees
escort me on this time-trodden street,
where how many times had I passed you by?
My phone in nose, sleep dust in eyes,
until you snapped me out of this late summer haze—

this summertime sadness—

without wanting to sound cheesy
like Lana Del Rey though, like her,
“Nothin’ scares me anymore”
(including the premature dichotomy
of hot autumn days)
if it means I get to live
having known you longer.

I walk down this street now,
my heart full of gladness
that you dropped these jewels,
these semi-precious clues.

Nothing can halt the turning of leaves.
Now I admire them shimmying in the breeze.