Category Archives: About

Nov28

The birth of Corpoetry

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About eighteen years ago a chance remark from a colleague at the Chronicle-Herald, in Halifax, Nova Scotia, sparked off a buzz that has now eventually found expression in a collection of fifty poems that I’ve titled Corpoetry.

We were discussing an ad concept, when we heard that extra boisterous forced laughter that one associates with laughing to please. “Ah!” my colleague and friend said, “Corporate Laughter”. I found the phrase amusing and apt. But it entered that odd space that exists inside our minds where tunes get trapped, phrases beep-n-bop around, lyrics of songs we don’t even like buzz and we can’t get rid of them. So ‘Corporate Laughter’ bumped around inside my head.

I tried to dislodge it by listening to old music. Next I recited old nursery rhymes. Nope. It was still there. Grinning like a gremlin, ‘Corporate Laughter’ it said and hooted into my sleep, my dreams, my quiet space. Nothing helped until I sat down and wrote the first poem in what is my now published collection: Corpoetry. Then, like a deflated balloon it shrank to nothing.

The ‘thing’ didn’t disappear. But, I had found its weak spot – to write it out of my system in a poem – please understand I use the term: poem, loosely. These poems aren’t your highly artistic, searching-for-the-meaning-of-life poems. They’re just fun.

After that, every so often I’d see a situation that gave rise to another poem and then another. During my lunch hour, I’d sometimes use the clip art available and mix and match it with word art to create doodles to complement my poems. I had so much fun doing these that I soon began to see more and more situations, office dynamics, gossip, etc. that gave rise to ever more poems.

And that, dear friends is how Corpoetry began. You can find out more on my Facebook Page.

Corpoetry_cover_Page_02 copy

Nov16

Fajr, the morning prayer

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This is a fragment from something else I wrote some time ago…

Especially across the hush of the desert and the sand-coloured villas and high-rises standing like silent sentinels, you can feel it. That pre-dawn stillness when, for a brief instant, the ‘night life’ senses a shift that is not of the sands or the stones and it starts to turn in to sleep for the day. This is just before the ‘day life’ begins to awaken. The very stillness rings out like a clarion. Unbeknownst to themselves, the creatures of the day respond to it. They stir in their sleep, they mutter. The denouements of dreams culminate and bid farewell to sleeping minds still enwrapped in their tales behind closed eyelids.

An almost imperceptible warming of the chill night air is counterpointed by the chill of the night air that is not willing yet to surrender its lower temperatures to the balm of day. They are poised mid-step – Night and Day, Light and Dark, yesterday and today. The dance of their two winds is halted for a moment, captured in the tapestry of pre-dawn, the warp and woof of life. And they make a brief exchange in silence. The merest kiss of a farewell. And then the deep velvet of the bowl of night is tinged at its very edge with a lighter shade of dark.

It is at this time that the muezzin sitting in the minaret of his mosque can just distinguish between two threads and his practiced eye informs him which one is white and which black, when it is day and no longer night. Then he raises his clear melodic voice to the skies and chants in his pure tones, “Allah hu Akbar! Allah hu Akbar!” God is great.

 The sound reverberates through the as-yet dark streets and alleys, up stairs and down narrow lanes, past shuttered windows, through richly carpeted hallways and equally over mud-smoothed stairways. It floats over sack-covered spices in the souk, caresses the dates and figs in their baskets and stirs the flies. It sends mice scuttling for their warrens and cockroaches for their drains. It wafts past curtained chambers and beaded blinds, closed eyelids and the last cobweb wisps of dreams and nightmares alike. Pushing all away. Announcing to every ear in this island of Islam, Bahrain; the miracle of the birth of a new day.

Nov6

A 50-word story

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I was thrilled when I learnt that my 50-word story, based on a poem I’d written, has been selected as the winner in a competition on Oapschat.

It is based on a real event that took place in the souk several months ago. First it was a poem, then it became a pithy story. Believe me, writing flash fiction – of any length – is quite a demanding exercise.

I’d love to feature anyone else’s 50-word stories here, do share. Sorry no prizes but if, in my opinion, your story merits it, I shall feature it here.

If you don’t want to follow the link here’s the winning story:

“You know Kite Runner?”

The Afghani salesman asked.

“Yes,” I ignored him, “How much?” indicating amethyst earrings.

He opened his lacerated hands.

Ashamed, I looked at him. “I loved the book.”

His hand on his heart, “I have more stories will you write them?”

“A thousand times.”

“Tashakor,” He smiled.

Over to you…

 

And here I am, holding my prize: “My Gentle War” by Joy Lennick the judge at Oapschat the publication that ran the competition.

2014-11-12 11.38.08

Oct30

What makes a poem?

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Please can someone tell me if they see a poem here?

I am not versed, if you’ll pardon the pun, on some of the ‘new poetry’ but honestly the poetic value of the piece here completely eludes me!

After the model is struck by lightning, she becomes really good at yoga. She teaches classes at the small studio by the harbor and afterwards has long talks in the parking lot with her students. She sees the way they stare at her, like any minute something might happen. And they all ask the same questions; they want to know if the current made her body bend better, or if she can feel things about the future. But all she knows is that she was struck by lightning and then she wasn’t. Sometimes she wishes it had done what it was supposed to do, but she has never said this out loud. Her boyfriend makes jokes at parties about how the television reception is clearer now, or how he’ll stand away from her when they walk in the rain. She doesn’t really like him very much anymore. In horror movie storms, skinny bolts of lightning walk across the sky with the shuddering legs of a yearling, but she knows that’s not how it really is. She remembers how it pushed against the night and lit up the sky’s nervous system before it hit her. She remembers how it singled her out. In class a woman who was attacked by a shark shows her a scar that starts at her calf and gets wider as it winds up her waist. It’s the first map of lightning she has ever seen and she can’t turn away. The frayed fault line is like a fossil of electricity, evidence of a fever. In it she recognizes the turn and rip of the current, the break of a bite from nowhere—

Aug23

The World of Silence

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by  Fr. Denis Lemieux

Where silence is, man is observed by silence. Silence looks at man more than man looks at silence. Man does not put silence to the test; silence puts man to the test.

Silence is the only phenomenon today that is “useless”. It does not fit into the world of profit and utility; it simply is. It seems to have no other purpose; it cannot be ex­ploited… It gives things something of its own holy uselessness, for that is what silence itself is: holy uselessness.
The basic phenomena take us, as it were, back to the beginning of things; we have left behind us what Goethe called “the merely derived phenomena” with which we normally live. It is like a death, for we are left on our own, faced with a new beginning—and so we are afraid.

Still like some old, forgotten animal from the beginning of time, silence towers above all the puny world of noise; but as a living animal, not an extinct species, it lies in wait, and we can still see its broad back sinking ever deeper among the briers and bushes of the world of noise. It is as though this prehistoric creature were gradually sinking into the depths of its own silence. And yet sometimes all the noise of the world today seems like the mere buzzing of insects on the broad back of silence.
Max Picard, The World of Silence

Reflection – This is an obscure book by an obscure author that a couple of us at MH have discovered recently, and that I am enjoying very much. The author writes with poetic, almost mystical conviction on what I think is an important subject, perhaps one of the most important subjects there is, in fact.

Our world today flees from silence. There was a study at the University of Virginia recently that was much reported in the media, where a large percentage of people, when asked to simply sit in silence without any distractions for a mere fifteen minutes, preferred to administer mild electric shocks to themselves rather than do that.

‘Silence puts man to the test’. And so we flee from it. We surround ourselves with distractions—electronic devices on which we can play games, listen to music, watch movies, chatter away or follow the twittering chatter of others. It is not that all these devices are evil and must be rejected (it would be rather hypocritical for me to suggest that), but rather they must be put away regularly, turned off frequently, silenced daily.

It is a very deep matter, this necessity of silence for the human person. It is this whole business of uselessness, of a non-utilitarian mode of being. Our world today, insofar as it cluttered by noise and chatter and ceaseless activity, is a world of utilitarian values. What use is it? That is the only question. If something is not delivering some value to us–diverting us, feeding us, informing us—then it is useless and to be thrown aside.

But as with things, so it is with people, right? We cannot adopt a utilitarian attitude towards life without extending that towards the people in our life too. And of course then we have the phenomenon of people being thrown away, or at best (and what a sad and pathetic best it is) judged and valued by how ‘useful’ they are. An insecure and terrible way of being.

And so we have the need for this holy uselessness of silence. Picard is right—silence is the one thing that cannot be exploited economically. It is available to us, free, at the simple price of turning off all the sources of noise in our life. And it is a very deep matter—Picard is a very deep writer indeed on this subject.

Silence as ‘death’, as returning us to the immediate experience of reality, underived, uninterpreted, raw and naked, like Adam at his creation, silence as this vast towering reality that surrounds us and threatens to engulf us, silence as a constant presence encompassing the world of noise—these are serious things to consider. We flee from silence; really, in this we are fleeing from reality, from ourselves and from God. Ought we?

NOTE: Fr Denis is a friend’s spiritual director, a priest of Madonna House, which is her spiritual home and community located in Ontario, Canada. He has a blog TEN THOUSAND PLACES which you can easily access (http://frdenis.blogspot.com) but he no longer invites comments as he is a very very busy priest and cannot attend to all
he is also an author of several books

Aug19

My Imagination

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By Patsy Mills

I work as a Security Guard at a Halifax campus and one of my duties is to patrol around the outer perimeter of the campus. It only takes about ten minutes or so to do and very rarely is there very much to report about. So, to make my patrol kind of interesting, I use my imagination to give myself a chuckle once in a while.

There are three big garbage bins from the company Re-Group. The Re stands for Recycle, Reduce and Reuse. Part of my patrol is to walk around them to make sure nothing out of the ordinary is around them. Never was told exactly what was meant by “out of the ordinary”. As long as there are no small dead animals or being over run by rats or ants, then, I don’t mind covering the territory as required. It is very boring and the garbage cans have become the basis of my imagination.

The garbage bins are square with two flapping lids on the top. Sometimes the lids are open and sometimes they are closed. The words Re Group are written on the front of the bin.

My imagination portrays the bins in an animated form, and I am human, not animated. Similar to the pairing of cartoon and human done on the movie of Roger Rabbit or also, compare it to the movie “The Night at the Museum” with Ben Stiller and all the statues in the museum come to life after the museum closes.

I am walking along on my patrol, minding my business and as I get closer to the area where the bins are, I can hear voices, as if they are in a heated discussion. I turn the corner to walk closer to the where the garbage bins are and they catch a glimpse of me approaching and then I hear, “Shhhh!!!! Sh!!!! Stop talking you two!!! She will hear us!!! Shut your Lid. Come on guys , we need to “ReGroup!!!!” Shh!!!

As I get closer, I walk around the bins, thinking to myself, “I am SURE I heard some voices!!!” Even if I did hear voices, uh, from garbage cans, ha ha, I think All I would hear would be “trash talk”.
They are just ‘Has-Bins’. I am a lover of using Puns or play on words even when thinking to myself. As sure as I was that i heard voices, I think I was trying to coax a response out of these bins, even though that sounds crazy as the birds.

As I finish my patrol, I walk away. It was either a breeze that flapped the lid on the bin, or was my imagination making me think I heard one of them give me a raspberry as I am walking away.

I turn around and give them a raspberry and continue on my patrol.

NOTE: THIS IS A FLASH FICTION STORY FROM A FRIEND IN HALIFAX SEND IN YOUR COMMENTS!

Jul19

In memory of my mother

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July 18th was my mother’s birthday. Every year it rolls around and every year I think of her. She was a major influence in my life and today I think I have the strength to post the eulogy I wrote for her. I wasn’t able to attend her funeral or her memorial service, so my sister read this out to the scores of people who came to pay their respects to her.

TO MY MOTHER

“Woman, behold thy son, behold thy mother.” That was one of my mother’s favourite quotations from the Bible. For son, I think we can all read ‘child’. The other was the Good Friday hymn, ‘At the cross her station keeping, stood the mother gently weeping’. For her these were like guiding lights. And, she was above all else a mother, as fiercely maternal as a Bengal tigress. I think she would have liked the metaphor – no, she’d correct me, that’s a simile. And, although many of us in our family were at the receiving end of her particularly well-honed tongue, I think I can confidently say that we had all also been at the receiving end of her maternal care. She has comforted, helped, taught and just plain ‘been there’ for more people than I think I’ll ever know. A little thing could move her from being a towering inferno to a tower of strength. And only ma could get away with combining both.

Speaking for myself, she taught me everything, from school lessons to the big one about life. Not so much by what she said as by her actions. From as far back as I can remember she embodied what today people would call ‘feminism’. She didn’t hang a name on it. She just went out there and did it. I’ve seen her playing squash in a sari. I believe she played a deft game of tennis and badminton too. She swam, unembarrassed, in a swimming pool at a time when we rarely saw other women even get into the water. She drove a car long before we saw other ladies drive, at any rate in some places in India places like Bangalore and Jamnagar way back in the 1950s. She was a strong woman with very definite views and we secretly nicknamed her sergeant major.

Thanks to her, we had boyfriends and broken hearts and she was always, I now recall, not obtrusively there, but there; with her ‘there’s many more fish in the sea’ wisdom. Afraid as we often were of her, we knew that we had no stronger champion when it came to doing something new, different and perhaps not popular with the older generation of my time. I remember her interest in theatre. She took part in a play for which I helped her learn her lines but I wondered how she could stand up in front of all those people. She gave me an interest in Art, and took us to dozens of art exhibition that we enjoyed and they weren’t school trips. Books, we shared. I recall my mother giggling out loud over a book called Aunty Mame and then laughing over it myself. Poetry. And with the passing years I’ve found myself digging around in the garden finally coming to her enjoyment of plants and the regeneration that they represent.

Today, more than anything else, that’s what she would like us to celebrate: the regeneration of her love. Growing, and like the earth, giving forth of its bounty, where our tears are merely the rain which makes flowers called Smiles, Laughter and that most beautiful rose of all, the one that’s called Remembrance.

Jun2

Twenty-one again!

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21 for 21

…that’s what the invitation said. That number took me back to the day I turned twenty-one. When the palate was young and my taste buds were alive to every nuance of flavour and texture. Back then, when aromas teased one’s nostrils, they imprinted olfactory memories onto my grey cells to be drawn upon in later life.

It was a time when intense was the shade of every colour in the rainbow, even those less vivid like green and yellow hidden between blue and orange. When a sunset was grist to my writer’s mill and could, on one day move me to tears and on another to revel in the joy of being.

So what has all this meandering in my memory banks got to do with an invitation from Obai & Hill and those lovely ladies Wafa and Zainab to Vapiano’s 21 for 21 press event?

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Feb21

Threading the Needle

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A Bahrain Writers’ Circle Creative Workshop Exercise

Secreted from the underbelly of the moth caterpillar called Bombyx mori, it sat in suspension for thirty-five days, a single filament one and half kilometres long. The cocoon was plunged into a hot bath to loosen the glue that held the threads together. Then it was cooled so that this thread could be unravelled. The caterpillar died in the process. That fine single strand of silk, for which a life was sacrificed, then joined three other martyrs to form a thread of one of the finest, most prized fibres in the world.

It shone in the light with a gentle glow, blushing as each of its minute three-sided faces caught a sunbeam that exposed its lissom length and supple sinews. It glowed as a moonbeam caressed its tresses. And it stretched in pleasure almost to its tensile limit pleased at its own resilience as one of the strongest natural filaments in the world. Its pride was short-lived.

Before it could revel in its own existence, the thread was trapped. Caught and wound into a skein. Then, enslaved in a ring, the yarn was packed off to a fabled land, Turkey. Here in the dyer’s harem the skein lost the innocent cream of its youth and was plunged into an indigo dye.

The indigo whispered its own sad story of capture, beatings and torture. The two strangers in a strange land wept and embraced each other. As their tears mingled the indigo imbued the silk with the softest, most beautiful hue of sorrow – blue; the kind that shines bravely in the sun and glistens pensively in the moonlight.

Today, a three denier thread of that silk waits suspended, rigid with fear, as a lady’s fingers clutch its neck and aim to push it into the oval eye of a sharp metal spike. At the last moment the thread flinches and dodges the eye of the needle.

The lady looks at the thread, then gently slides it over her tongue. The wet muscular rough appendage arouses an old memory – the glue that once held each strand tight and safe in that cocoon of the Bombyx mori caterpillar so long ago. The recollection makes all three deniers cling to each other now stiff with anticipation as they fly through the eye of the needle. It is threaded.

And the slavery of the silk is complete as the metal spike pulls all three strands together through the squared fabric to form a blue daisy in the lady’s embroidery. The silk sighs as it succumbs to its eternal punishment, forever bent, never free to flow and dance in the light again except in minute parts of its length as it weeps across the tapestry.

Note: This was another exercise through the Bahrain Writers’ Circle – Creative Writers’ Workshop. Back then we had a different format: we’d do exercises and were then given homework to share at the next session.

I remember it was given to us by  Shauna Nearing Loej when, as a group, we were mendicants going from one refuge to another. At the time we were kindly granted a spot in a bookshop in Adliya. Shauna gave us us all a choice of subjects to write on. As usual I, ever the ‘teacher’s pet’, had done my assignment – the above post. It was an inspired piece although written frantically the night before we were due to meet. The atmosphere was perfect: dim lights, leather sofas and a slight chill in the air. I intoned my piece and at the time felt my voice sounded almost sepulchral, later I was told I sounded poetic! Anyway, this was met with such enthusiasm that I sent it to the Flaneur, where it still resides as a story under the same title! I’m hoping it’s okay to publish it here after almost two years. And I hope you will enjoy it.

NOW PODCAST

Thanks to Morgen Bailey, this is the first time a story of mine has been Podcast!

And, here are the links

iTunes
https://itunes.apple.com/podcast/baileys-writing-tips/id389840707

Just sharing the info… don’t feel obliged to listen to it 🙂

Other links taken from Morgen’s email to me:
I’m pleased to say that the podcast of your flash fiction is live. The direct short link to the relevant blog post is http://wp.me/p18Ztn-8Kp and long link ishttp://morgenbailey.wordpress.com/2014/04/27/baileys-writing-tips-podcast-short-stories-episode-no-39. Feel free to use them wherever and whenever you like. I’ve also added the details to the Podcast Short Stories, Flash Fiction Fridays and Contributors pages.

The links to listen to the podcast are on the blog post but they are…

iTunes (the first item), Google’s Feedburner (scroll to the end), Podbean, Podcasters and Podcast Alley.

Oct13

I missed Malala

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…At point blank range

With Malal Yousafzai so much in the news again with reports and articles such as these:

in the The Prague Revue

in the Washington Post

and in the New York Times

I thought the time is right for me to post a poem I wrote several months ago on a chance remark made by my husband when I wondered how the would-be assassin could miss Malala at such short range? And he replied, ‘Perhaps he couldn’t do it’. And from this, the following poem arose:

The training it was thorough

The orders loud and clear

The young girl was a menace

And she was spreading fear

I really didn’t get it

But my superiors were sure

And on the Internet they said

Her demands were all impure

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