Three Haibun Poems by Lynda Tavakoli

 

MINAB

there is a sickness

and it is in the knowing

that we look away

Here you are among a classroom of girls, your cupped hands a receptacle of words spilling like spring water from the well you visited yesterday with your grandfather. Words that also sing along walls of the school corridors in drawings that teacher pinned neatly into place after a project you did last week. One of them is yours; a snow-topped mountain, a river of trees and a sun of burnt ochre stretching its arms around the picture like a giant hug. There is an English word FRIENDSHIP inked into the foreground by your eight-year-old hand and today you will offer up a brief translation before the others in your class. You are happy knowing that grandfather told you words matter in any language, and even those that seep through the cracks of a cupped hand still have meaning. So, you will rise softly from your desk and in your child’s voice tell a tale of love and kindliness, and what it means when both become incinerated by hate.

  

KITE SONG

the toy of a child

keens its long lament

into endless sky

His child’s fingers roam across the treasures arranged at his feet: a fray of chorded nylon, some yellow plastic and a few small fragments of driftwood weathered by the sea. It would be enough, as long as his father could find some sticks and a longer piece of string for the flight.  He does not ask for help. He has watched the others carefully, absorbing the intricacies of touch, their attention to detail, and the love story of their imaginations. His might not be quite so remarkable, but what did that matter when the wind would weave a melody through the clef of the sky and sing a kite song all of its own? Today this is his only joy, and tomorrow the world will see the shredded aftermath of his short life beached on the sand: a fray of chorded nylon, some yellow plastic, a few small fragments of driftwood weathered by the sea, and the body of a small boy extinguished for simply - being.

    KEEPING THE SILENCE

in sealed cattle cars

      the livestock breathes unseen 

their breaths like ash

We did not live normally then. I understood this when I asked my mother what the trains were used for, and why it was that we could not see the inside of the carriages. Hush, she said, one day we may know, but not now, not today. Today we cannot question and we must not see. And because I was still a child, I did not ask again but only stared out past the tracks beyond the knowing, to rising smokestacks swathed in silence and something else I did not care to think of then.

what we do not see

will always be a reason

to cover our eyes

Lynda Tavakoli lives in County Down, Northern Ireland, and is a professional member of The Irish Writers Centre. She has won several international poetry and short story awards and been nominated for Best of the Net and the Pushcart Prize. Lynda’s recent poetry collection ‘A Unison of Breaths’ is published by Arlen House and her digital book with video ‘Unbroken/The Gaza Poems’ is published by Live Encounters Publishing.