Two Poems by Lynda Tavakoli

 

THE BIG FREEZE

 

They were found together,

limbs stretched like starched shirts

abandoned on a washing line,

fingers, stalacto-stalagmites of frozen touch.

Winter had finally seized them,

their black crow cloaks no match for the worst

whiteout in a hundred years.

 

In stories they were witches,

two sisters hiding their eccentricities

in the anonymity of a bog,

magic spells and caldrons

fodder for tale-tellers around the

open fires of my childhood.

 

But hiding in the pinked dapple

of a rogue beech I had watched them once,

their meagre chatter bouncing off each other

like the sonar of a bat, their faces soft with kindnesses

as one by one they picked words from the earth

and rested them upon the other’s mouth

like a coming melt of snow.

 

 

FORTY-THREE GRAMS

 

Too early to name, you were too unfinished

in the womb for anyone to love but me.

At fourteen weeks your stubbed appendages

denied you somehow proper meaning to the world,

yet I imagined then the promise of your touch

and flying fingers someday glancing on piano keys

or toes that curled like leaves in winter after frost.

 

Behind those swollen sockets

I would never know the colour of your eyes -

if they were brown or blue or hazel like my own.

But somewhere past a sea of years

I watch you dance beneath a saffron sky

on meadows crusted yellow in a summer sun

or hear your footfall whisper soft on winter snow.

 

Yet now your nearly heartbeat grieves in me,

its pulse the baby miracle I never knew.

Just three and forty grams -

a single letter’s weight of life unfinished

in the womb. Too early then to name

so I completed you inside my head

and loved you just the same.

'The Big Freeze' won the Westival International Poetry Prize and 'Forty-three Grams' won the Listowel Poetry Award a few years back. Both are included in my debut poetry collection.

Lynda Tavakoli lives in County Down, Northern Ireland, where she facilitates an adult creative writing class and is a tutor for the Seamus Heaney Award for schools.  A poet, novelist and freelance journalist, Lynda’s writings have been published in the UK, Ireland, the US and the Middle East, with Farsi and Spanish translations.

Lynda has been winner of both poetry and short story prizes in Listowel, The Westival International Poetry Prize and runner-up in The Blackwater International Poetry Competition and Roscommon Poetry Competition. Her poems have also appeared in The Irish Times, New Irish Writing.

She was recently a guest poet on RTE1 The Poetry Programme and her poem, ‘You’re Beautiful’, was featured in the ‘Words Lightly Spoken’ podcast.

Her debut poetry collection, ‘The Boiling Point for Jam’ is published by Arlen House.