Two Poems by Mimi Khalvati
PN Review 73, May - June 1990
(Photo by Jude Willetts)
Congratulations to Mimi Khalvati, who will be awarded the King’s Gold Medal for Poetry!
The Gold Medal for Poetry was established by King George V in 1933 at the suggestion of the then Poet Laureate, John Masefield, and is awarded for excellence in poetry.
Rubaiyat
for Telajune
Beyond the view of crossroads ringed with breath
her bed appears, the old-rose covers death
has smoothed and stilled; her fingers lie inert,
her nail-file lies beside her in its sheath.
The morning's work over, her final chore
was 'breaking up the sugar' just before
siesta, sitting cross-legged on the carpet,
her slippers lying neatly by the door.
The image of her room behind the pane,
though lost as the winding road shifts its plane,
returns on every straight, like signatures
we trace on glass, forget and find again.
I have inherited her tools: her anvil,
her axe, her old scrolled mat, but not her skill;
and who would choose to chip at sugar-blocks
when sugar-cubes are boxed beside the till?
The scent of lilacs from the road reminds me
of my own garden: a neighbouring tree
grows near the fence. At night its clusters loom
like lantern-moons, pearly-white, unearthly.
I don't mind that the lilac's roots aren't mine.
Its boughs are, and its blooms. It curves its spine
towards my soil and litters it with dying
stars: deadheads I gather up like jasmine.
My grandmother would rise and take my arm,
then sifting through the petals in her palm
would place in mine the whitest of them all:
"Salaam, dokhtaré-mahé-man, salaam!"
'Salaam, my daughter-lovely-as-the-moon!'
Would that the world could see me, Telajune,
through your eyes! Or that I could see a world
that takes such care to tend what fades so soon.
“The poppy signals time to scythe the wheat”
I quote my mother though I don't suppose
she scanned it quite like that but found a brief
and simpler way to say that poppy grows
when wheat is ripe, like anger, love or grief.
For anger cannot foster change when dumb
to fault a man, nor love that cannot scythe
his pride fulfil him; grief will not succumb
to guilt that bears a grudge to bear a wreath.
No anger, love or grief will harvest good
till men can learn to listen, women learn
to speak, and turn their dreams to likelihood
of change and peace, redress and union.
The day he died my mother cried all night,
her tendrils round me, wound towards the light.
(Photo by Jude Willetts)
Mimi Khalvati was born in Tehran, Iran, and has lived most of her life in London. She has published eight collections with Carcanet Press, including The Meanest Flower, shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize 2007, Child: New and Selected Poems 1991-2011, a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation, and The Weather Wheel, a Poetry Book Scoiety Recommendation and a book of the year in The Independent. Her pamphlet, Earthshine (Smith/Dorstop Books 2013) was a Poetry Book Society Pamphlet Choice and her Very Selected Poems appeared from Smith/Doorstop in 2017. Her awards include a Cholmondeley Award from the Society of Authors, a major Arts Council Writer’s Award, and she is the founder of the Poetry School, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and of The English Society.
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