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Poems
Poems
Poems
Christmas in Kerala, 16-26 Dec. 2004
The Banks of the Pamba
First a cockerel then
a prayer wavers high over the rippling,
no ordinance more vocal. Then the Anglican
canticle and the muezzins. A golden oriel, catlike,
weela-weeos. Two cormorants fly
from a palm. Women are scrubbing silver pans,
slap-slapping fabric. Egrets flap
like draped washing. Everything a layer over
everything.
Girls shake out their wavy hair, real as weed
from the Arabian Sea.
A water buffalo swoons to its eyes
in jungled water hyacinth.
A fisherman loiters with bow and arrow,
another baits his line, casts it
to gleaming scales and scattered bones
in the great eardrum of the river.
Snake Boat
I have seen the boat built of anjili
at Champakulam Chundan.
131 feet bear more than a hundred rowers,
four steermen and eleven drummers
to anticipate the race.
Snake boat bagged many trophies
in Kerala, the board is lettered
with an intricate pattern
of curling text.
I've watched lizard
nd water snake-
diamond markings, nostrils tipped
above the skim,
never quite realising
life might depend on air-gulped
spasms or what depletion
means.
I've walked paddy fields, past umbrellas,
brushed up dust.
heard drums drumming
a race against time.
Celebrating
3 a.m. a dog barks. Fireworks splutter.
A frog click-clicking finds its purpose. Once again
the drums. Voices echo
moonlight. An auto-rickshaw's horn.
In a galaxy of cadence someone
sings Silent Night.
In Periyar rutted & cratered roadways cross
woods where tigers chum with deer.
Ganesh the elephant disembodied
sways silent among
flying squirrels, black monkeys, wild boar
and poinsettya - the Christmas star.
Tourists
slouch, lumpen,
while the upright man fingers
the edge of his lungi
in perpetual anticipation
of looping it double over his shins
calves uncluttered,
swift water all around,
or swaying skirts of courtesy
the way a kingfisher might swoop
and show its hidden face.
Kochi
Silver still prinks the bouganvillea; a clear-eyed sky.
Fat crows that should be faint with the heat
see-saw on frames of Chinese nets.
Whatever rises
lights in drops
and down into the dark.
All the fishes sprang up, they must have known
Earth has only to shift its slumber
to twitch a patch of tectonic skin.
The moon is bloated. The ocean
swathing earth is snake,
a shrine in which I first imagined death.
The globe wobbles on its axis.
The late sun squashes the sea which suddenly explodes
beyond the little wall.
Green is for gods
but
fear drums on my ear.
Birthday Letters, 1994-98
Dear Auntie,
April brings the usual sun rain sun
and your first grandchild one
whole year. The photo shows her smile
Sanjay says it is similar
to his. He doesn't know
I'm writing. Speaks with his brothers, though
he feels the weight of your silence.
My gain is your offence -
first boy & family pet broke all the rules
by marrying outside the caste. Your grief fills
me with sorrow and Sanjay's happiness is hard won
I will look after your son.
Dear Auntie,
Another April! Here is Sangeetha on her bottom.
We'd like to visit you in Colombo
then you can see her for real.
Because of my troubled labour, she'll squeal
at the animals and doesn't walk.
Often we have to take her in our arms, talk
gently. A beautiful girl, people say.
She's doing so well. These are little cares of the day.
As for us, we move from one
minute to the next in surprise & expectation.
Dear Auntie,
Sangeetha is four and pushing the pram.
Vali, eighteen months, came out a little tiger.
Not all big sister's orders get obeyed!
I am well. Sanjay is frayed
because you have turned your back on him.
I'd like you to accept that things dance on the rim
of our lives over which we have little control.
To your grandchildren, your voice is a hole
in a stocking. Life will be over much too fast.
Can we unlock the past?
Publications
Magazines in which I’ve published some 100 poems 1999 include :
Acumen, Agenda, Ambit, Critical Quarterly, Coffee House, Envoi, Equinox, Frogmore, Interpreter's House, Iota, Links, Magma, New Welsh Review, The North, Orbis, Outposts, Poetry Nottingham, Poetry Review, Stand, The Shop, Seam, Smith's Knoll, Stand, Staple, The Times, The Wolf, Wordplay.
Competitions
Three highly commendeds at competitions are from The Plough, Amnesty and York 2004.
Public Reading
In 2002 I read at the Poetry Festival at Wells-next-the-Sea.
Pamphlet![image0[1]](../assets/images/autogen/a_image0_1_.jpg "image0[1]")
First pamphlet Swimming Lessons (Cidesterna, 2002/5,
£6.95, ISBN 1 899604 27 8) is a sequence of poems in the voices of a mother and her daughter, charting their relationship through adolescence, anorexia and her death of cancer at the age of 42. 'The poems are spare, quiet and unsentimenatal, with a restless, rigorous honesty about them.'
Eleven of the poems provided the basis for a play twice broadcast on Radio 4, in September 2005 and 2006.
The Pamphlet is available from the author or Hawthorn Press, 11-12 Websters Yard, Syderstone, Norfolk PE31 8SJ.
Anthologies
Light Unlocked, Christmas Card Poems, Enitharmon, 2005
Soundswrite Anthology, Soundswrite Press, 2005
Reviews
- by UA Fanthorpe
Sally Festing’s another feet-off-the-ground writer, magical and visionary; she confuses perspectives brilliantly and entertainingly .' )
- Marilyn Hacker of Magma 32
'It’s impossible to name all the memorable works, but ‘Concerning Some Pictures’ by Tony Curtis, ‘The Autopsy’ by James Sutherland-Smith, Sally Festing’s ‘The Banks of the Pamba’, are just a few.' the Ploughshares website
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