Every week on the Muslim Writers’ Salon membership community platform I set two writing prompts. This week one of those was to open old journals or your Notes app (or similar), and dig out something you’d written ages ago and forgotten about. Brush it off, edit it, maybe rewrite it or add to it.
I had just found a poem in my Notes app that I’d forgotten about myself, which prompted the prompt. (Pretty meta, hah.) But then, searching for photos of my beloved, late poetry mentor, Daniel Abdal-Hayy Moore, and some of his last comments in his erstwhile poetry mentoring group on Facebook, I discovered a bunch more poems I’d posted and forgotten about.
It came to me that they were ghost poems. They transported me back to the moments I was in when I wrote them, the moments I wrote about. When my children were young and I was overstretched, lucid, my sensitivities twanging. Stories falling into my poems like cats dropping off a shed roof, scrambling and squalling but somehow poignant.
Tonight is the longest night of the year and for some reason this feels like an appropriate moment to share some ‘ghost poems’. To enter the welcoming swath of night (only 11 hours where I am) by recalling those calques of former states, allowing them to be relived again momentarily, re-inhabited.
Isn’t that all reading is – allowing a writer to temporarily inhabit our minds? OK that sounds spooky. But by imagining ourselves into other lives – including our own, of former times – we come out the bigger, the wiser. More for memory.
SCENE BY A FAKE STONE AGE ARCH
I turn off the burner
grab my bag
leave them to make their own sodding
hummus salad wraps
stomp up the hill cursing the
fairground that always intensifies
the petulant bickering, the
badgering for loose change
Sit with my tasbih by the fountain
under a mighty Aleppo pine
next to the fake Stone Age arch
its stones too mossless its
brick crenellations too varnished
to be convincing
A VW Golf cruises past
reverses into a parking space
and a woman’s voice shrieks
in a bloodcurdling pitch
“For God’s sake, stop crying!”
Faint child whimpering.
She slams her door shut
opens the boot, stomps off
lurching under a shopping bag
and a girl of about 6 bumbles out
wipes her face with her T-shirt
and flip-flops forlornly after
A few moments later
out of sight behind the fountain
I hear the loud sound
of a cheek being kissed
CIRCUS TIGER
Bound by paw and feet you are
made to perform fire-ringed
feats to the sting of a whip
or the ring of an open
can of meat
The bars dissolve when you look through to
fields that skip between towers
and melt in waves of tarmac heat
but they cut off your passage
like curious fingers
savaging you small
When you are
turned loose upon a
grass you never knew
pools to sink into you
close your eyes to feel your fur float –
this green is not new.
It’s been foreshadowed in dreams
an imprint of places seen
for Paradise is in your genes
freedom is what it means
to return to the home
only your bones dared
believe in
Bonus: a satirical poem I almost didn’t recognise as my own – until I saw I’d attempted to write the most pretentious poem ever. Another fun writing prompt to try while you burn the midnight oil.
CORN FRITTERS
In the dark entrails of the
crunchy
whistling night
a
frog is spawned from
a tiny gelatinous ball
like my eye
leaps and is
forgotten instantly
in the whirlpool of
not-being-seenness
(C’mon, Fred,
you whisper,
let’s go get some
KFC.)
Secrets tumble from the
Universe’s wrinkled brow
into my mind
an open platter
of Mama’s corn fritters
surrounded by the lettuce
and prawns
of my distractedness –
Somewhere
a dog is
shitting
Wishing you all a delightful Shab-e-Yalda! Please do join us for a bit of poetic revelry tomorrow, Saturday 21st of December, 4pm GMT, for a Celebrating Rumi online Salon with the Muslim Writers’ Salon – it’s free :D