She was asked to wait, but had wandered ….She found herself standing there, where labyrinthian alleys and long shadows led her, to the remains of a once protected courtyard
Amongst the rubble stood a date-palm defiantly bearing fruit, and in the alcove faint traces – a dusty outline of her now lost photograph
She found herself standing there.
There, where a cat now sat basking in the sun. The sun had never reached this inner corner of the room before
In the dream the cloth slips from my head. I hurry into the room and rearrange my cover willing it to stay in place, the mosaic only offers a fragmented image. but amongst the mirror flowers on the wall a large enough piece has dropped, and I see the outline of her face. ….or is it mine?
With some measure of permanence, the blueprint of the house though exposed, carries the secrets
Her laughter and light enter through the window pane,
splashing colour on my disheveled bed even now.
In the village they tell a story – of a girl gathering fodder, and a judgement.
The men decide.
When she dies
– they say she is a girl no older than nineteen and taken quite suddenly in the dead of the night.
An undetermined time has passed since then, hundreds of years,
but it feels like just yesterday that they placed her on a hasty pyre,
and no priest awaited to soothe her hesitant footsteps into the beyond.
They might have said:
We don’t wait
We have the fire
They might have said:
We don’t wait for the wailing shadows of the women
turning the air black with their noise.
We light the pyre.
They might have asked:
who’s taking care of your home?
They said you are already forgotten…
She said they will be reminded and should they return, will find her standing right there.
There where the tamarind tastes the same and,
scents from the first rain on dry hungry fields waft in the air.
There where even though the walls that protected the court now need protecting themselves.
And from within the façade of crumbling walls and absent doors,
she slowly starts to re-draw in her heart the lines of a familiar map:
This rectangle of the courtyard where as a child she rode a bicycle in dizzying circles.
At one end growing are the trees she planted as seedlings.
Here the hollow of the pond with the same tap an annoying drip drip drip that still sways the water
growing circles in the reflection of the clouds and the sky
There a mere shadow of a room embracing that solitary date palm.
And on that once smooth wall, now architecture of exposed brick and mud,
is where she had instinctively drawn pictures.
as children do….
I find myself standing here to hear a story about a girl.
The same story told for centuries and no sooner told, brushed aside.
A story of broken walls and women taken before their time, framed in photographs with stoic smiles.
The camphor from the burner carries on the wind and reaches where dream and waking blend,
only to separate again, reminding me of glitches in time that I now know I have been missing.
Picking a pomegranate growing on the other side of the wall, I start to water the garden at the edge,
where the conditioning of then mirrors the now. I sort tangled threads of stories that must be told
… of fires that are still burning
They say you haven’t been missed.
Enough time has gone by and no one has come looking.
What will you do now that all the seasons have gone?
You wait for a girl whom you do not know,
but will get to know.
You have come to listen to her.
Presented by Varsha Nair for: Voices from the Courtyard on December 20, 2020. For Womanifesto 2020: Gatherings.
She wrote this poem whilst traveling in Iran in 2006, where she visited and photographed women’s courtyard spaces mainly in Shiraz and Yazd. The poem was edited in 2020 to include references to recent events of continuing violence and rapes against women and young girls in India.
She found herself standing there.
She was asked to wait, but had wandered ….She found herself standing there, where labyrinthian alleys and long shadows led her, to the remains of a once protected courtyard
Amongst the rubble stood a date-palm defiantly bearing fruit, and in the alcove faint traces – a dusty outline of her now lost photograph
She found herself standing there.
There, where a cat now sat basking in the sun. The sun had never reached this inner corner of the room before
In the dream the cloth slips from my head.
I hurry into the room and rearrange my cover willing it to stay in place,
the mosaic only offers a fragmented image.
but amongst the mirror flowers on the wall a large enough piece has dropped, and I see the outline of her face.
….or is it mine?
With some measure of permanence, the blueprint of the house though exposed, carries the secrets
Her laughter and light enter through the window pane,
splashing colour on my disheveled bed even now.
In the village they tell a story – of a girl gathering fodder, and a judgement.
The men decide.
When she dies
– they say she is a girl no older than nineteen and taken quite suddenly in the dead of the night.
An undetermined time has passed since then, hundreds of years,
but it feels like just yesterday that they placed her on a hasty pyre,
and no priest awaited to soothe her hesitant footsteps into the beyond.
They might have said:
We don’t wait
We have the fire
They might have said:
We don’t wait for the wailing shadows of the women
turning the air black with their noise.
We light the pyre.
They might have asked:
who’s taking care of your home?
They said you are already forgotten…
She said they will be reminded and should they return, will find her standing right there.
There where the tamarind tastes the same and,
scents from the first rain on dry hungry fields waft in the air.
There where even though the walls that protected the court now need protecting themselves.
And from within the façade of crumbling walls and absent doors,
she slowly starts to re-draw in her heart the lines of a familiar map:
This rectangle of the courtyard where as a child she rode a bicycle in dizzying circles.
At one end growing are the trees she planted as seedlings.
Here the hollow of the pond with the same tap an annoying drip drip drip that still sways the water
growing circles in the reflection of the clouds and the sky
There a mere shadow of a room embracing that solitary date palm.
And on that once smooth wall, now architecture of exposed brick and mud,
is where she had instinctively drawn pictures.
as children do….
I find myself standing here to hear a story about a girl.
The same story told for centuries and no sooner told, brushed aside.
A story of broken walls and women taken before their time, framed in photographs with stoic smiles.
The camphor from the burner carries on the wind and reaches where dream and waking blend,
only to separate again, reminding me of glitches in time that I now know I have been missing.
Picking a pomegranate growing on the other side of the wall, I start to water the garden at the edge,
where the conditioning of then mirrors the now. I sort tangled threads of stories that must be told
… of fires that are still burning
They say you haven’t been missed.
Enough time has gone by and no one has come looking.
What will you do now that all the seasons have gone?
You wait for a girl whom you do not know,
but will get to know.
You have come to listen to her.
Presented by Varsha Nair for: Voices from the Courtyard on December 20, 2020. For Womanifesto 2020: Gatherings.
She wrote this poem whilst traveling in Iran in 2006, where she visited and photographed women’s courtyard spaces mainly in Shiraz and Yazd. The poem was edited in 2020 to include references to recent events of continuing violence and rapes against women and young girls in India.