Scintillating Scotoma (Firework in my Eyes)

Klimt's Fulfillment, 1909

Let me see
if I can make
poetry out of this
Let me see
if I can whisk
fear out of this

Scintillating Scotoma -
I like the way it fits
the visual fire,
the zig zagging
iridescent
shimmering quagmire
of this.

Hold still,
my whirling dervishes,
so I can count you,
             claim you,
             calm you
Hold still,
so I can draw you,
                   close

We aren't the first
to do this.

- Shaista, 2011

Remember I told you I was having a funny time with my eyes? Last evening, I had an MRI scan to check my brain wasn't harbouring anything illicit. Lying in the white tube with earmasks on, warned kindly by the radiographer that "It will be very noisy!" I thought about Amal. (I wrote her a poem last year called Crossing Borders). I realised that all children of Gaza and other war torn areas, who have shrapnel discovered by MRI scans, lie in just this tube, listening to just this machine gun fire exploding near their head. How doubly, horrifyingly scary for them.

Thinking about Gaza perhaps didn't exactly help, because post scan and dye injection, I had a bit of a turn, and it was all oxygen masks, canula in my vein, briskly wheeled off to A&E. But then... aha! The emergency doctor on call lit up when he discovered he could write POET in his notes, as he had, of late, been craving poetry. Naturally I recited a couple of poems (the one about my mother holding the steering wheel, and the one about the team of medical 'ologists haunting me - he liked that!), and then, as a treat, the doctor responded by letting me see the mind bending technology of my MRI images. I look a weird little alien in X ray language!! Think I'll stick to poetry :)