Poetry

Must Write

(c) Famida Basheer

Because people live

in the incongruities of their existances

believing things will change.

Because happenings occur side by side

state by state nation by nation

because the News is ignored

because governments that can handle the madness, dont,

so poets must write anyway and be ignored anyway.

There is more sanity in a thorn

than in a rose that adorns a graveside.

There are answers in each street

to questions that a priest

would never dare to ask.

There is more music in the breath of an atheist

that cannot make itself harsh enough

to breath fire and brimstone

or turn tables in a synagogue.

Unawares things creep up on the unsuspecting.

They see rules and lines that they will not dare to cross.

So poets must write anyway and be ignored anyway.

A dream written ages ago

is studied in classrooms by teenagers.

Some poetic thought from a century ago

is memorised and whispered by lovers.

Some old reminder of a dilapidated morale

triggers off a response

in the conscience of the present.

The possibilities are ominous,

the responsibilities are a whole new religion

so a poet must write

and keep on writing.

The Wasting Ways of War

(c) Famida Basheer

They all weep.

War poems,Documentary scripts

File pictures, all cry that

War is about the men;

(sometimes women)..they dont seem to see a child

With auburn curls and gaping eyes

Wide.. not in wonderment

At sight of angels or reindeer skies

But startled lashes that flutter

At Daisy cutters.

War is about the children

Who cling a security rag

That sweeps their earth of its history

And writes a whole new geography

In a stranger's script.

.. Is about the child that learns to hide

Not at play to be sought and found with glee,

But with terror in his eye.

Is about the unhoned brunt

Of a psychosis yet unborn

For those the Red Cross slipped.

Is about children at home

With Papas in the air

Short-lived heroes.. alive or dead.

Is about children in the streets

Who cannot recognize their mothers and fathers

Among the splash of red.

Blood is lighter than water here

Water solidifies yet thaws unflawed to flow again.

Blood clots and is interred if the body is fortunate.

Blood is thin with fatigue;

Thin with the manipulations of thickset minds.

Thin and clotting and powerless.

As powerless as startled children.

Norwegian Woods

(c) Famida Basheer

So they give him more age and take away his memory

what did it matter; it was just one more toy

that wandered down the stairway stopping now and then

fingers feeling for ruptures in the banister.

Lennon , Iskon , Harrison and all that

wonder why he loved them

They were only people or something

Here comes the sun

Popcorn never tasted so good.

the feel of new jeans

wafts of grass sweetened air

cloying with rapturized bodies

Stuart Sutcliffe, Pete Best

love me do or dont

it dosnt really matter

Yesterday today or tomorrow

It's still all dense

Norwegian woods.

After The Highway

(c) Famida Basheer

Around his car the old man cares

step by step his buffing rag

polishes it into a new day.

Still, it dangles the happenings

of yesterdays drive.

He remembers the children

who ran up to see

the dying dog , dark as asphalt

that locked eyes and a last canine breath

with their angry grief;

its parting energies melting in their bones.

A Walk In The Woods

(c) Famida Basheer

Festered path

Deep dark and promotional

Pits and prickling underwood

Balking at their own temerity

I grab a swollen club and I am Moses

My breaths spill

To cleave the denses

I am pursued only by insipid

Pungencies of thought.

They chase on Egypt's mares

While I trot

Into April that adamant salvation army volunteer

Who clothes all winter's starks in fresh.

Her cartons acquit the season.

Everybody gave green.

Converse with me squirrel

In that tongue that you and I share

A controlled diction

A startled squeak

A muttered prayer into paws

For the passing leaves

And for the new.

Polygamous springs meander in ecstasy

Swilling its ancient promiscuities.

Rasputins smile severely.

Their reds startle the stun of a sun.

Take it away Abba.

Late as slate you made better commies

With fire inside your souls

Among an arena of ashes.

Getting home.

(c) Famida Basheer

The facts of a kitchen sink

The eventualities of a wok

The affirmations of two-minute pasta

The latitudes of an Iron box

The awry laundry jungle

The occult dances of a broom and pan

A hairdressers' hallucination of a mop.

The dooms of a trusting garbage bag asking to be walked

Only to be deserted in a strange dump.

The afterlife of yesterday's books

The delusions of today's newspapers

Software downloads email backlogs

Grabbing at crawling eyes

That hesitate to look

Towards the negligence of rugs and beds.

The amoebic smudges on doorknobs and fridge

The camaraderie of electronic accents

Beating in tongues against a breathless clock.

Such pledges and more await

Like ravens on an elastic line

As I set my key in the door to my home.

I should have titled this poem Impend.

Woody lanes

(c) Famida Basheer

Lazing through these woody walks

Raptures and skills chill-stilled among the

Bracken crackle of childhood warmths

Arraigned into a crumbly mess

And I am fast adult

Gaping past locked window branches

Seeking sky through thicket drapes

Escape the realms of spluttering laughter

Left behind like awful dreams

They are not true

Nor this nor these

Each step in ginger stealth I guess

Unsavoury unease

And yet such bravado is born

Of nought but childhood dreams..

Cherish ( For Mummy)

(c) Famida Basheer

And all else is farthest from my mind

except that distant memory

vivid with smells of touch

tracing misty sketches

with what today charged with hindsight

I recall as the fathoms of love

Not then... oh then I was a greedy recipient

rocking myself in your locked arms

seeking only to recieve

as you gave and gave

and gave...

I cherish for you a cradling hug now

I save in it a million thank yous

I lock within it all the truth

that there is between here and the hereafter

for you are in that place in time

when it is just right for me

to mother you back Mama.

The painting on the wall

(c) Famida Basheer

The wall stares me.

In its cyclops eye a landscape

a picture of a moment

embraced by swollen redwood

more fussed and bossed to glow

than Alladin's lamp.

All else is matt

oil shine in urgency trapped.

Cool hues of sky and earth

of river ripples and the overbright high

that manouvered it to be day

where herds had browsed and hungry shepherds dreamt

and all around the hills unperturbed

went visiting the valley

bearing gifts of streams

and sulking fish and reeds.

A foot stool rests my feet;

stub toes point to green

and truant leaves and one bright red roof

and I am drowsy tonight

in an afternoon setting.

Up until now

(c) Famida Basheer

I have a vase, I have some pretty flowers

I have some fern and leaves of shape and size

nestled between florist's foam and baskets

But how do I arrange them to a mime

Of natures pure that lilted them in beds

that spotlighted their petals against greens

that dabbled there in lime and here in darker

from bud to bloom in tune with astral clime?

For me they wait with patience that is hurdled

by fates that plucked them off a swaying thought.

Hibiscus,Roses,Lilies, Gladioli

Each termed for various life spans in a pot.

Where should I point their sighing faultless faces?

East to hope and longing; or the west

where sunsets promise dawn; or skyward whence

warmth lingers on the brow till dew may bless?

From history to history their graces

have spanned the globe in un-mysterious charm

their blushes and their aspects framed by painters

into some still-life art of untrue calm.

They know they seduced bees and sulking beauties

They watched new buds and urged them to a bloom

They counted leaves as yellowed down they wandered

among the breezes eager for their doom.

I cannot put them back from whence they came from

Or hope to stop their death before their time.

Nor give them back the dreams they lost forever

or put them in a safer light and clime.

I know now why the flowers held in vases

never smile the way the garden does

or why Refugees smile no smile in strange lands

Or why they lack that element of trust.

Core

(C) Famida Basheer

And sleepless night is here again.

Within these woods I lose myself

And seek between the dark and deep

of stippling lights,an unsure sketch

those hidden mysteries that were the soil

that fashioned a thing called Man.

Within this stippled darkened light

This I seek in truth

To take to canvas that primordial core

that harks within its tardy self

a spirit of kind lure.

To lay bare for him his basal truths ;

To strip his base coats peel his whims;

To display aloud his true cements;

To view his self without that self

of primitive pretension or procured pelf.

I avoid his abstracts.

But where there is light I would seek to find

him shorn of Fear and Guile;

Those two bastard offspring

Of his own frailities

that are second nature in awhile..

I would that I could see him

noble and in command

Of all the senses that conspire

Within him, and against him.

A Gerent of gentility, a Slave without servility

A Thinker of effective thought

A Philosopher too his charges shorn

of illusions of obscure fantasy.

His nature thus braced

I would see him fit with easy swing

Within each role of social loop

A rationale of flexi- mind

An earthy Earth-man of simple truths.

He is no dreamer this human I envision.

He builds his sights around his facts

He simply is, as is, is is.

he has no court with what is not.

And no desires blot the path

to his boundless horizon.

But these are worldly woods that I

have grappled and am lost;

I consider then in anguished debt

my Maker who so mighty and true

to strive to rein that Core in man

did barter with His Son.

Refugee

(c) Famida Basheer

Returning March

The grains of sand drier

between our toes.

The waves warmer.

What destiny can hone a time

more sacred in its indecision

than a year gone by?

Ravens take flight

and sparrows from convalescing trees

where something is sprouting each day

after that painful shedding. Much as we shed;

our inhibitions, our more stringent rules,

our severe thoughts, our passions, our misgivings.

Yet those birds fly back each evening.

Only we the lesser who walk on darkest wings

must carry on walking

leaving behind our homes

breeching our tomorrows

with the cling of our yesterdays.

A Brand New Eden...

(c) Famida Basheer

one goes in to buy a second mink

a garment with an European look

and a delicate French wrapping .

return the bundle

before talking of refinement,

for who can complain if you are not included

in the profit return.

none called me to provide guns

to make a new deal spread

to record the felling of a tree;

to wash some underwear in the sea

but I am a creature in the nude

that took a bitter drug,

determined to lend support;

wading through a sea of humanity,

bathing in their interchangeability

between the tapered points of diversion

on the beach.

i never undertook to start

a piece of amusement

with something dubious gained

by hideous mind manipulation,

but to appear in court

ever so briefly

to eat and drink with,

kiss and transform,

Sodom and Gomorrah;

to head off the beasts

of another kind;

to create a brand new eden

and there to rest!

Insomniac Carbons

(c) Famida Basheer

It is nicer really to walk

alone and in the dark.

No Moon, no Stars;

only the hum of Lucifer snoring

in the overhanging branches

and the crackly mists of day-memories

assume a night light whose silhouettes

are too dark to view against the dark.

External blindness is not a dark place.

It is instead a senseless light and to be avoided

just as one would the overbrights of reality

that ooze out of too much knowledge

to seep into your psyche

to play Pretend

and not much investment of thought.

Oh turn away then Halo flashers!

The trouble with you is

that there is more enlightenment

in the stark of night

than the musings of your day

can even begin to fathom.

Wake up Lucifer. Shake up man!

You dont want to miss the ultimate dream!

Mailman

(c) Famida Basheer

Walking his zig zag path

like an ant lost in a drawer

the postman knocks to drop in a letter.

They know all about each other in these parts.

They have read each other's

wedding bans birth announcements

even helped write obituaries.

The mail though is a personal thing

to be welcomed into its own little container

engraved with a door number

and a decorative pattern.

Letters are such a close experience

that may get tossed into a waste bin ;

or read many times, then folded gently,

kissed and laid carefully within

the wilting pages of an ancient Bible

filled with ignored Holy Words

bulky with others papers more esoteric

than the Songs of Solomon.

The postman too gets mail.

His wife reads them out aloud

as she frowns on his dusty shoes.

Still

(c) Famida Basheer

Here we go again

lined up like crows on a telephone line

never facing

nothing of meaning to say to each other

In the market place that is life

there is cacophony

The haggler and his vendor

have bought and sold

and nothing really said.

There are delusions of conversation

among the chatter on buses trains

planes waiting rooms telephones.

The silence is deafening.

Beneath the Glaze

By Famida Basheer

Thus then among each faltering footstep rides

a will to stride to march to tall to fly

unfazed by all that bogey-trails the eye.

To sit beneath a tree that lasted well;

lean gently upon gnarl of bark and swell

the breath to breathe each waft of leafy sigh.

Such infants roam the grass of nature's bind

they crawl in insect form and human kind

Their eyes seek truth, the ears a new birth cry.

Yet gently each must pain the tryst to be

alive and well in that old realm of known;

to live one life.. to calm..not seek to die.

Door

(c) Famida Basheer

They are paltry translations of distant songs

And yet I know they ooze from a woman's heart.

The words are familiar; the implosions palpable.

Bound to someone she loves, the 'L' word

flattens her dreams against herself.

She who lies starkly awake

leaves her thoughts naked

in a house choked with sleep.

She sleeps within herself

in places you cannot see.

They say she has lost it

beckoning passing people from her window;

chatting with the sky.

I say she has found it.

The promises of passing through a door out

to reach a whole new world, are many.

To stay fixed and view the world

through a private window are fewer.

Yet a woman's love is stronger than any door.

She is bolted to the floorboards of her home by it.

Did I hear you say that that is her weakness?

Almost

(c) Famida Basheer

They all bring bad news,

Letters , Love and War.

There they are,each surfacing when the other two descend.

And actually all I meant was to take myself for a walk.

Love, in the commonest sense of the term

drags back on itself with a will

that cannot be anything that could stand up

tomorrow and say I did that.

That can say we are so acheivers of the unacheivable.

Like the Wars they invent that keep coming back

again and again in different forms for different reasons,

not all of them totally unacceptable.

Most of them hang back and pull

and a part of the world succumbs.

And all the while what is promised is Freedom.

Freedom is a lost assumption.

It can not mean a good thing anymore.

Freedom means the plucking of someone else's freedom

in order to find your own.

Freedom is a lost sense of purpose.

It sleeps when the world awakes

and wakens when the world is beginning to yawn

all the while chattering about itself.

That is one reason why we have war.

There are other reasons

but they sleep under the tables of congress.

That is why peace is advocated as better than Freedom.

With freedom one can use all those delectable warheads,

then send letters of condolence.

Love the man after he is dead.

And Peace? One can talk about Peace.. Ad nauseum.

The Arrangement

(c) Famida Basheer

Perhaps the dimly lit street that walks home alone

ponders at how our lives

have played hide and seek with angels

among a forest of Trees of Knowledge,

whose branches mutter and sigh incessantly;

where a human whisper is a cacophony of awareness

startling between the spells of wisdom's silences.

Like the arrangements within a raindrop

that only a snowflake would know

angels palm our breaths and carefully pattern them

beneath those trees.

Trees that bear fruit which we must devour

in order to be raised into that perfect circle

of light, that is only one of the many promises

for the hereafter to keep.

Cached

(c) Famida Basheer

Among the taverns of literature

within the pubs of prose

sitting squat legged under the village tree

making sense of its idiot

whispering under tables

in exchanges around the world

standing aside as the beast of rhetoric

struts down senate corridors

flexing its power muscles

to an assemblage filled with

the dumbed,

Among celebrations

among moments unsaid

among bridal wear

in baby cribs

in the silences of a chapel

in the cacophony of a bazaar

in little drops of ink

in the flutter of a keyboard

in the rustle of new paper

between sips of tea

hot sips of glorious tea,

is where poetry hides

clutching at the bars of its imprisonment

awaiting a key that will fit a lock

that never was.