Three Poems by Lynda Tavakoli

 

PATHFINDERS

 

The starlings are back,

making voices in the eaves,

scuttling noisily

through the residue

of last year’s debris,

keeping me awake.

The past welcomes them

with familiarity, nothing more,

and through spring and summer

nature will absorb the sludge

from their wintered bones.

I lie in bed, imagining soon

the scaldies, clutching, like bees,

to the others’ legs in sleep,

dreaming of the pilgrimage

of flights to come.

 

I think of all those journeys

now unfulfilled,

and absences

that scuff like spindrift

on the surfaces of seas,

or hearts left sundered

from the haemorrhage

of human touch.

Yet as the world’s

dark shadows cede,

like fledglings

we will know the tug

of a forgiving sky,

where dreams have wings

and every pilgrimage

a hope fulfilled.

 

 

AFTERMATH

You were a stand of splaying arms,

of wrinkled wood,

and when I was old enough to straddle,

limb to limb, your tenuous embrace,

I carved my name in your skin,

juicing sap with every gorge

of thumb and blade

to craft out some invisible tattoo.

 

An aged man you were then, though

yielding to my childhood misdemeanours

like a weary pensioner.

For years I watched the cicatrix

of every letter marinade your bark

as though you soaked my soul into your heart,

holding fast that trace of me

when adulthood allowed me to forget.

 

I did not think, a half a century ago,

that I would someday find your body ousted

from the hollowed earth, the gaping chasm

of your mouth stretched like a yawn,

your shoulders shrugged, your great arms

elbowing the earth in half-expected resignation.

And somewhere scarred within the fallen bulk of you

a faded eulogy of letters lost forever to the past.

First published in Dreich Magazine 2023

 

 

FIRST DAY AT SCHOOL

(For the children of Beslan)

 

I remember it - my first day at school.

 

The smell of new cut grass,

the soap inside my cotton bag

from some old dress my mother made,

a tang of polished wood from classroom floors

or cabbage and potatoes that waft down corridors.

 

The sight of it,

the greyed and crumbling

walls of chiselled stone,

so big for one so small to fit into

or so I thought when I was four.

 

The touch of mother’s hand,

the sound of my own breathing in my chest.

These things I memorise within my mind

the day I started school.

 

I remember it – their first day at school.

 

A day as filled with hope as any other,

when they had smelled the grass

and touched their mothers’ hands,

or heard the bell and tasted

the sweet promise of success.

 

Until their dreams were sacrificed

upon the altar of a stranger’s cause,

that shattered and destroyed

a thing as fragile as an angel’s wing

and left our souls bereft.

 

But we can hold their missing futures

in our hearts, to let those wings take flight

and gently soar upon the softer winds

of summer days, or in between the corners of our sleep.

 

These things we keep

in memory for what they lost,

the day they started school.

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. She 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. Lynda’s debut poetry collection, ‘The Boiling Point for Jam’ is published by Arlen House and includes these three poems about the different aspects of war.