I´ve long been passionate about the environment and spent many years raising money for Greenpeace. I do yoga and love to dance and to walk in the countryside.
I live in North London with my cat Samhain, in the shade of a magic apple tree.
January 2011
Psyche Come Home
(for my friends, wishing them happiness and the blessings of the gods)
Intent as tightrope walkers
They pass together through night´s nuptial garden.
All their paths are necklaced with lights, trees laden
With lucent fruit, mirrored in the sapphire
Of the pool between the columns.
Clangour of instruments wakes their wedding day:
Archaic horns out of a fantasy of Babylon
Blare epithalamic overtures;
A tachycardia of drumming
Speeds us to the threshold of union
Under marigold garlands and scarlet parasols.
Draped in white and gold,
Hung with aureate chains and filigree,
She is ushered to her marriage rites.
Flickers of incandescence attend her:
A flock of salamandrical goldfinches
In the hands of bright silked girls.
Uncertain conference with priests is edged with carboniferous smoke,
Harried by electronic bustle and flash of photographers,videographers,
And we plain Europeans, become exotic,
Skipping over sand that sears our soles,
Are photographed between coconut palms
By the Malayalam press.
Beyond the lagoon the monsoon breakers
Throw up depth charged foam.
From the awning of the mandap
I see it, as glorious and unreal as a painted backdrop
While rose petals, pink as fondant sweets,
Shower down around them.
He hangs a golden necklace around her neck,
Hard as the opposition of families,
Precious as the long anticipated life to come.
Garlanded in white and crimson they stand together
Parvati come to Shiva; Psyche´s tasks accomplished;
Eros, long since seen, now claimed.
So memories thread themselves like beads on a rosary
Along the flight paths that highwire their way in time out of time
From Trivandrum to Abu Dhabi and on to Heathrow
Until I am delivered from unpredictable poetry of India,
Into the familiar prosody of London streets.
2004
Prufrock´s Mermaid
Muscular as snake under coruscation of scales
My finned tail, mackerel iridescent, grips granite,
Reflects rainbows, sunshot water, stippled skies.
Over my breasts I comb my hair with fishbone,
Leaving it unsnarled
To float and flow, drift in the moon-dreamt tides.
Echoes in my song the sea light before dawn
And my sisters take up the aria of the stars,
Brothers reprise the clarion call of morning
And swimmers, baffled by the water, drown.
We have risen, breathing aqueous winds,
To weep with tears of air this unexperienced shore.
My seventh sister
Lives on land.
Tail crudely forked
She walks on knives,
Should leave behind
Gouts of blood clotted,
Sea anemones
Deserted by the tide.
Tongue sliced out
In the garden of death
Where polyps writhe
Now she swims silent,
Drowned
In the blind vision
Of a high-born boy.
She does not hear our song.
Under Venus shell sky of evening
I keep her vigil.
The deeps call me.
Should I plunge with the whales,
Humpback, blue, narwhal, finn, spermaceti?
Flirt with dolphins, shimmer through herring shoals?
Shall I chase penguins through Antarctic seas?
Explore the deep sea trench where rare light comes
Only from luminous eyes, from sulphurous vents
Where tectonic partings show volcanic fire?
Will I swim down to wrecks and giant squid,
Consort with skeletons of sailors,
Score my fish flesh on jagged reefs of rusting fleets,
Bruise my white arms
Against containered cargoes, split and barnacled?
I may at hazard, seize untarnished coins;
Dig in the sedimenting ooze to claim
Cups of porcelain, daggers of black silver;
Play among corroding shadows of mines,
Missiles, uranium enriched, unspent;
Weave between the metal rain of mortal war
Whose ships flotilla on the surface of our oceans.
A dive perilous, fraught with tooth of shark,
Toxin of man-at-war, shock of eel and ray,
For all its siren chance of treasure.
Shall I after all
Sit on this rock
Scrying my mirror,
Singing to my sister?
On the brink of the boundless sea.