Excerpts from ‘Tibetan Dance’ by Suna Afshan

Tibetan Dance

after Ryuichi Sakamoto

I cannot consider myself the author of the “play”,
but only of the words which are printed here.

— T. S. Eliot

VII. Playing Pretend

‘ . . . and if I’d fired the Rock,
Plugged my ears to his bid—
His truth inbred of my core,
Of my sin—, said no words,
Forgave everything, took him
In like a champ, unflinching;
If I crawled home alone at three
And if for an hour he had me
Tailed to my own front door,
Door to which I had no key;
If I stood under a streetlamp,
Smiled with these bendy teeth;
And if I was still betrayed
In a maze of my ingenuities,
No palm would bathe me in dates,
Infants would not wail in my honour,
Find me pure, without sin, greed—’
     And jerking on my tongue,
My jinn said, ‘Now repeat. Sing!
Sing of how you wed the Rock.
In the City of chippies and mills
You made perfect his will. Repeat.’

VIII. འཆམ Cham

Drought and blight in amber-time,
Lint and blister on England’s tongue.
No signal of autumn: no leaf moult.
For one-fifty days, in six whole months,
No conker dropped, no chestnut mulched.
Every hen lay cock, every ewe bore buck,
And sunburnt men erected their dens
As boys once did: out of the wreck,
For joy, treasure, trowel in one hand,
A bloody butterknife in the other.
     Only, in this amber-time day endless,
Sunny spells so long they were curses so endless.
And I danced with hands blown wide like starfish,
Leash between my teeth, barefoot, braless—
My jinn had learned quick avert his eye:
Bestial as ever, as always before,
Vacuum and vapour as ever before.
     In the end, I wept and fasted:
Forehead to carpet, fell prostrate. I danced
So prayed for northern thunder, northern rain,
Every English town soaked then swamping;
Wet each grainy scene in each photo frame:
The grandmother with halva piled high in a tray;
The girl in her kilt weeing down the motorway;
Wet every wellington, wet every lampshade;
And behind my lids each bifold buckling,
Terraces and cellars letting in autumn rain.
Then I prayed for apples hard, then apples soft,
Each crumble spire grey with English rot.
I prayed for keratin’s growth at nailbed and scalp—
O, I danced for the clippers, I danced for the toss!
     I fasted in a month of the nightly gibbous:
Moon not waxing nor waning but stubborn.
I fasted, and my jinn feed me pitted dates,
In milk muddled for me a little rose syrup,
But all I tasted was the blood-drained camel,
A little doe’s brain curried in tin and onion,
Sometimes the braising of a bull’s stomach.
And in a summer without storm, no breeze
Each night our play’s recital, encore, repeat—
And the leash through my tongue now deckled
With pegs swaying with each whim of his wrist.
     But ‘Funny,’ my jinn said, ‘to see your devotion,
When all your strength stems one small want:
The Rock staying in the mill towns ‘til autumn.
But in the City of minted terraces, semi-
Detaches, in the golden swirl of cul-de-sacs,
Find me the stony pulpits, your congregation.
Where are the red minarets of Great England?’

IX. Exorcism

Then, swan dance and murmuration
Over park ponds—one hundred corpses
Fuming in the dry basin, machetes, money,
The stuff of quills, pillows, premier bedding.
On our walks, my jinn and I tracked the omens:
Wry portends of summer shuttering into spring:
A shallow saucepan of water boiling, boiling;
Monarchs rising in the rot, the wilt, umbrage;
And out of the plum’s skin acne pushing.
In the green and brown keratin sprouted.
      ‘Time and again,’ my jinn said, ‘England fell
Out of seasontime, that alone your inheritance.
And the expat souls earmarked by slate, marble?
Those bodies curled in the ground, wed to a pose?
They still crave the yard’s ode to the paving stone—
Creeping thistle between cracks, milky, overgrown­—
Still want driveways in sight of chimneys, pray
For cotton and bitumen industries; tongues forfeit
In England’s greatest benevolence: immigration
Tokens. When they came, beneath nails their soil,
Their little girls, all chapped lips and ruined navels,
Swaddled in silk, heavy at mother’s waist like loaded
Rifles. Have you naught in common with them
But bone structure in an age of iron and sunlight
Deficiencies, moderate virtues, moderate vices,
Mass-made want, and mass-made thought?’
     And even though my tongue ulcerous,
Sore, hooked on his lure, I said, ‘If I’d warred,
Worked the riddles in the Rock’s thought,
If I wept, fasted, wore furrows into the carpet,
If I crooned the Rock’s name, hymned prostrate,
If I threw a fist through my own face, then again
Dug my own grave, if I stood in dawn’s lamplight—
O Light Invisible now bathing me: infusing in me
Holy thought, purge every ill aim, banal catastrophe,
Leave me pure—if every Tuesday, on my bad knees
I shrove, in the timekept City, City of cash and carries,
Where every mosque was once a full corner pub,
If among the barges, the bricks and the mortar,
Streets where I pushed empty prams at nightfall,
When the light of the day had dimmed, groaned,
As it did in seasons bound to their chain, cycling,
When dust lost its yellow glow, sky her pinkness,
If I had not taken you by the hand, invited you in
Through my door—O last shaft of Light Invisible,
Most Gentle, Preserver, First Witness, Benevolent,
O Light That Waits, Light Ever Patient, Merciful,
Mercy, O Light Invisible, dimming day, mercy—!
If in a timekept City, I wielded the Rock’s art,
Lit your shadow with a match, fought you off,
Would you have given me up, after all?’
     Tongue tined, I spat blood and wire
Through his embers. I laughed and I laughed.

Suna Afshan is a poet, editor, and translator living in the West Midlands. Her most recent publication is Tape Letters: a Translation into Poetry commissioned and published by Modus Arts in 20203. 

Author photograph by Maryam Wahid.