Roshnii

Pebble on my path, you trap my toe and make me question which way I am going.

Pebble, you set me free – my fingers curl around your coolness, which sips the warmth of the sun.
When I hold you, I am taken into a quiet place beyond myself.
In and around myself, an openness that is always there but hidden by the noise.

Pebble, take me to the seashore: the edge of the land, where the water licks the sand.
Your home, you are set there in stone but move in strong tides, rattling over your brothers and sisters.

Pebble, I keep you on my desk where you remind me of what it is to be quiet and alone, without questions or solutions.

I write because when I write blood runs on to the page and forms rivulets that merge into an ocean. A sea – a jumble of words with all their twists, turns, curves and corners.

Words that sit together comfortably like old grandmothers. Words that curl around each other, scaly like lizards’ tails. Words that talk, words that sing. Threads like guitar strings, each a unique note that resonates on the page.

I write because I need to, because my heart beats louder when I think about it.
I write because writing is my romance, the love affair I have been engaged in since childhood.
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Prologue:
As I walked up Gray’s Inn Road, the rain came down in thick streams. The dampness working its way through the inadequate jacket that I had borrowed from my Mum’s coat rack.

I heard a slap and looked down to find the box of overpriced, organic salad that I had bought at the train station had fallen through the bottom of the paper bag, its contents of grated beetroot and carrot spilling on the paving stones.

I was late. I was hungry. The baby strapped to my chest had raindrops running down his cheeks. And, I was on my way to have root canal surgery for the second time in a week.

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Heavy swing of doors
Shoes squeak on lino
Low buzz of voices
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Swans glide, wings beat deep and wide – carving their migratory path through the south sky. Sparrows dive in the wind’s slipstream. Beaks pierce the clouds like the skin of a dream.
Soap bubble floats up high. Round window of rainbow light.

Tree branches finger the sun. At their feet, a thinker bends his mind in on itself until it finds the Oneness. His toes in the grass, clutching the dew. His eyes turn inwards and follow the ghost’s footsteps into the dark cleft of the tree trunk.

His heart beats with no surrender. His heart was once tender but his eyes are blank as a dartboard bullseye. A melody finds its way to his pursed lips and, without a kiss, he begins to whistle. Soft was the song, with notes sweet and long like drops of honey.

She sits, dipping into the quiet spaces that dwell between the thoughts – collage of sounds and pictures that clutter the cerebral walls.

The quiet spaces – cool refreshing pools formed by the rainwater that falls, sometimes a trickle, sometimes a torrent, on the earth.

Where the water falls, seeds planted lifetimes ago find nourishment and begin to sprout and grow. Eventually to flower – petals spreading like flakes of coloured light that catch the Sun.

Petals, like invisible velvet to the fingertips – disappearing between the skin – soft, yet almost imperceptible. Their colours gold and fuchsia, deep poppy red and cornflower blue.

Early morning sunlight enters the window panes. She opens the windows and smells the air – grassy, sweet, fragrant with flowers, alive with birdsong.

The sunlight warms her eyelids, burning away the sleep of night.

A white coin
Hangs in the sky.
It turns and turns
Like a twinkling eye.

Spreads its light
Through houses and dens
And crosses the land
Over fields and fens.

A stretch of sky.
My thoughts drop into shadow.
I can no longer beat my wings,
Standing at the edge of this cliff,
Far below, a sea,
Into which I am about to fall.

I feel the fear of the fall,
Grope around for a hold on the sky.
Can I stop myself dropping into the sea?
No, I am sucked under by shadow.
Losing my foothold on the cliff,
Alone and weak in the wings.
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Wanted to pop it out
on the page:
Painless,
Perfectly formed.
But it takes time
and patience
to slowly shape it
into something
rhythmic and whole.

Two minds,
two hearts,
two bodies.
A spark,
A beginning.
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She looked down at her knees and sighed and cried and wished she were thin and that the birds outside would stop their whining. The leaves hung limp from the branches like discarded clothes. She tried to force a smile but her cheeks burned with misery and she could not remember how to turn the muscles of her mouth upwards.

His footsteps still sullied the hallway leading out. Always out. Never in to where she sat waiting. Her fingers fumbled the jewels around her neck, cracked and useless like broken glass crunched beneath boot soles that slammed in her face. Continue Reading »