MAY THE SUN SHINE ON YOUR WENDY HOUSE

The heat! The heat!! 

The Amazon fires! 

Last night I trawled the house looking for a fan and came up empty handed... 

This summer has been a summer of children coming and going - one nephew and niece from Singapore, and now my twin nieces from Malaysia,  and as you can imagine their houses are designed perfectly for intense tropical heat, the humid or the dry kind. ‘Where’s the air conditioning?’ Bella asks, as she flings herself about in my bed trying and failing to get comfortable. 

Me, I can’t decide. The heat can be a tricky thing to manoeuvre a body so sensitive to extremes of any kind, but sunshiny light casts a sense of hope over the world for me. Glaucoma as a condition is a net of darkness, the thief of sight, and I am constantly battling a world of changing, shifting, unnerving shadow play. So when the strong summer light comes and stays, I feel living becomes possible again. Reading becomes possible. A house full of books and fading sight can be a tough pill to swallow.

Speaking of pills, do you remember the very first person you knew who took pills? It is generally an older person, isn’t it? Mine was my grandfather. He had surgery for a pacemaker after serious heart attacks and I remember all his tablets, and although vibrant in spirit, how frail his body was with his walking stick ever near; so it has been an odd business being the tablet taker from the age of ten. And wondering what the four children make of their aunt with her tablets, and eye drops and staying in bed so much, and chipping off to the hospital for hours and hours, and sometimes days, weeks... but after the ghastly campylobacter and PICC lines of earlier this year I seem to have escaped nasty infections thus far. (Touching wood madly...)  

 
I had some scuffles with A&E, am hobbling around with Achilles bursitis trying to catch Pokémon, balancing my days finely on excruciating migraines... a new drug and I did not fare well together and my steroids have been souped up. Rituximab is around the corner albeit half the dose and twice as far apart. Also, I had a birthday with hand made cards and some delicious Malaysian food … 

So onwards like a bullock pulling a cart I go - we go - together, into light and heat and coolness and shadows, building campfires for warmth, creating Wendy houses for play, wondering if the little mouse who was bold as brass on our kitchen counter the other day has run far, far away.

 

VERA, AN ANNIVERSARY

A small brown bird flies close to me.
Yesterday, a butterfly -
- white, monarch -
I scent my grandmother near.

She was not a poet
Nor a deep thinker,
But she liked the quiet,

Which was strange
Because she hated to be bored;
And yet she could sit for hours

On balconies, in conservatories,
With only herself for company,
A book, a ticking clock,
And the sky - ever changing, ever the same.

©Shaista Tayabali, 2019
Inspired by Vera, my beloved grandmother who died a few days after my birthday, six years ago... both our anniversaries are coming up as Vera and I were born only two days apart. Many lifetimes but only two days... 

 Participating in DVerse Poets Friendly Call to Open Link night ...