St. Ann's Well Garden / Seated at the start of True Spring
By Yusuf Misdaq
I’m facing the warm sun. The air is still chill, but the sun is in my face, and I’m wearing a few layers, so I feel okay. I feel good. I prayed this morning. I haven’t been praying much lately. Not at all really.
It’s so beautiful here. The sound of these English children in this park where I was once an English child. The English voices. The, “daddy!” shot out from the six year old boy at play, identical to how I once said it (a sublime balance of urgency and dependence).
The green grass. The barking dogs on the leash, or running free (with the leash running free). The intermingling dog owners who smile and then stop to chat. One is a very comfortable and stylish middle-class woman with healthy white hair. She wears a woolen shawl and a long skirt. She has bumped into a man she clearly only knows from walks in the park. His dog is also free, playing with hers. He’s in his fifties with a black leather jacket and a belly. He was wild and young in the 80’s, but is now settled and civilised. Because of what he saw in his youth, nothing today can surprise him, but nonetheless, he has now completely returned to his middle-class roots. The leather jacket is the only holdover.
Their dogs flare up into a scrap and the serene woman comes to life with that sudden vigour reserved solely for dog-owners, bellowing down on him,
“Harry!”
Of course. It has to be called Harry. All dogs around here are Harry. And the woman is serene again just a second later.
Magic.
And children play. And 12 year old girls go “whoo,” as they run unrestrained in the grass, set free by this weather.
And the birds are incessant, all around sound, all squeals and tutters and swarms and tittles and pk-pk’s and sar-sar’s and chuk-uk’s and soo-soo’s.
And here with us all is the plane-above-noise, which one only ever notices at this time of year.
Clear skies. Planes.
How am I supposed to say goodbye to all of this? I do not know how one is able to not live a minutes walk away from this park when one has always lived a minutes walk away from this park. When one was born a minutes walk away from this park. How does one not remain here forever? It is the same question as, ‘how does one not remain in love with the first love forever?’ For neither do I have a satisfactory answer.
Perhaps one does remain here, even if one leaves. And perhaps one never stops being in love with her.
The birds are still cutting and chipping away all around me, relentlessly kissing and touching my already awakened heart. More beauty, they say, more and forever beauty. Nothing but a continuously rising wave of jeweled, scented air, which never thinks of falling or tumbling, only of continuing. The birds make dots of honesty and bud-blooms of dreams appear with their voices alone. And inside their intricate clock-peg bodies, with the infinite music-heart, I wonder where the wind comes, to push that music out. There must be a hidden chamber somewhere inside them. Somewhere inner their fortress. Amidst their petal blood which is so clean and refined and free of disease.
These springtime English mothers know nothing of bird-flu. One look at their eyes should tell you. They are planets with moons inside of them. And they survey this world for all of time.
May, 2008. Brighton.
Source: Brighton Streets (Nefisa UK, 2010). Out of print.