Jill Rees: Welcome Press

Follow the spires:
You will see in the distance,
between the oak and the sycamore tree,
mist hovers over the ragged fields
and the cows lowly moo
at your heavy footsteps.

March on over the remnant buttercups of summer
screwing your eyes at the sinking orange sun.
Draw your leather coat tight round you
and breathe mist as you come.

There are no minarets, but
Follow the spire and turn left
at the car park beside the gravestones.
There you will see the names of my fathers.
Between the white cottage and the pink cottage
you will find me pruning roses,
sweeping back the memory.

Follow the spire:
you will find A garden of humanity.
I will sooth your wounded bravery.
You can say whatever you want
and if my friends are shocked by it,
you can laugh out loud.
Follow the spires
and come to me from afar,
wearing your long scarf,
your sad eyes
and your cumbersome dreams.
Come to me as you are.

Jill Rees
August 2008
 

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You raise your scimitar arm

and scowl, eyes like slits, the wind

raising dust behind you.

This is how things used to be.

We will take the hot train,

wiping our eyes and wrapping

our scarves again around

our heads. We will watch

the grey desert, expecting to see

camels, but through the haze

cars scream down the highway

to Ankara.

You order the boy to bring

tea on his silver tray

as I smile at the women

sat closely shoulder to

shoulder, and the shy children

clinging to each other start

to giggle. You grin and

soon they are sitting on

our laps and the women

are taking tea, dropping

cubes of sugar in the

decorated glasses.

When I breathe, the dry

heat scorches my throat,

and when we kiss the

sweat on our lips moistens

our mouths. It is like kissing

underwater.

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It’s not

It’s not your blue eyes
that tempted me,
nor your hair that billows
like the Black Sea.
It’s not your mouth
that grips a hard line
that I have to make smile.
Not your piercing mind,
your harsh wit,
or the way your perceive
wrongs through your skin;
nor your feet as you march
in a hurry with life,
as if beginning an endless path.
Nor when you look at me
as if there is nothing else,
like the moon cloudy and red
over Uzkadar. Not the Strait
which you see as an obstacle,
a bridge to cross,
not the wait for papers, no!

It is the simple sum
of one plus one,
it’s fate, the vastness of the sea
and the sight of land to reach.

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My Imam

Crisp heat rises on water,
harem-blue stained-glass
cutting the sallow patterns
of my sinewed heart,
veering round impassioned
traffic on Taksim Square,
swayed by old songs in new versions.
Hairy-armed men laugh as
they gaze critical and hungry
at European blonds. Your brow
thickens. You judge judgement
and find it lacking.

I am a woman of a thousand sequins,
taken from my jealous home
by idle curiosity. You’re a man
of dreams and firm convictions.
I sit in the dolmus imagining
your fiery hair flowing
behind you across the plains.
My dolmus breaks down
And I am escorted home
by a snow-capped man
who expounds Turkish hospitality.

Another writer smiles and gasps
at forbidden books, Jane Austen
and jail sentences.
In my mind you raise
your arms on the minaret
and sonorously call the dawn:
‘Prayer is better than sleep’.
Rising red behind tower blocks
the sun’s wind fiercely blasts
your robes. In fear and trembling
you stand firm,
and I want to stand by your side
(in your heart women are not forbidden,
my Imam) and raise
the tempests of change,
chant freedom into the
dungeons of the enterrored
as they clutch their scarves;

and I, I was blown here
into your arms.

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Kissing underwater

You raise your scimitar arm
and scowl, eyes like slits, the wind
raising dust behind you.
This is how things used to be.

We will take the hot train,
wiping our eyes and wrapping
our scarves again around
our heads. We will watch
the grey desert, expecting to see
camels, but through the haze
cars scream down the highway
to Ankara.

You order the boy to bring
tea on his silver tray
as I smile at the women
sat closely shoulder to
shoulder, and the shy children
clinging to each other start
to giggle. You grin and
soon they are sitting on
our laps and the women
are taking tea, dropping
cubes of sugar in the
decorated glasses.

When I breathe, the dry
heat scorches my throat,
and when we kiss the
sweat on our lips moistens
our mouths. It is like kissing
underwater.

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Across the Strait

A bleeding sun dies
behind the Blue Mosque
the Call to Prayer sings.
I lean over the chain
to feel the breeze on my face
as the sweat of the day cools
on the fresh ferry deck
and lean on your strong arm,
to attract your attention
surreptitiously.

Back on the Asian shore
I avoid your eyes
because they are the colour
of the Bosphoros
and would leave me paralysed,
but through my lashes I can see
you smile, unspoken,
and we all laugh at the joke,
but sustain our act.
Would you like a beer, my love?
and I will not call you my love
- it’s a pact.

We have searched the ports
of Europe and Asia alike
and found sailors are the same
whenever they swagger.
We live our lives like a play:
act one, scene one, day one,
but in the night we sit alone,
looking out of our separate windows
at the crescent moon,
the silver star, hanging
like a flag over the
Belbety Palace, reflecting
In your eyes and my eyes
As we cling to our determined loneliness.

In the morning the sun rises
yellow to the Imam’s call,
I turn over again to
hold you in my arms
and find dried tears on my face.
Continents are rent in two,
lovers never kiss, and time
tells us to say goodbye at the station
with a handshake.

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Bosphoros

This is the line -
the parting between the two halves
of our different lives.
one of us crazed, delinquent
and drunk;
the other dazed, serious
and sunken.

Colourful scarves line the
ferry seats,
while the men stand
and the waiter brings tea,
at the end of a hard day
the people sip,
commuting to Europe,
coming home to skewered meat,
stuffed peppers
and Baklava.
I drink yogurt and look at my hands.

Suddenly the Call To Prayer
howls out from a triangle
of mosques, echoed by the horn
of oil tankers and cargo ships
that stride like herds of elephants
down the Bosphoros, through
the silent Strait, the sea
the colour of your eyes.
The lined-faced men and stunned
to see this European blond
hit her palms against her head,
tears streaming down her cheeks.

Your arms, like the Twin Towers,
could hold me, and now they
are gone, a shattered
building hit by the earthquake
of ur broken hearts,
the memory of your kisses
flows like lava, hot and strong,
down the mountainside of our love.

On the Asian side I sit
dangling my feet over the dock
and no-one bothers me.
the collected sadness in this
great nation of deserts and
seas plays background music
to my hopelessness
and sometimes I stand
outside the secret bar
and watch the men, silently
drinking beer as if in
mourning, and imagine
you also live in sorrow.
This is a rupture that should
never be, a nonsensical
blue line between your heart
and me.

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.

It took me a while to call you
By your proper name Wien.
I used to call you Vienna.
Like Vienna schnitzel
And Wienerwald in the days
When I still saw Kafka’s eyes
Everywhere I went,
Skulking round the Haus des Meeres
Eying the Kokoschkas,
Peering from behind the
Cafe window, tutting at
Chocolate cake and
Fighting against the system,
Knowing we wouldn’t win.
At the station
60 kilometres from Vienna
I had to ask
Is this the Vienna train
And the man laughed
And shouted Wien Wien
You are not what you seem.
Can anyone love you more than I do?

I packed my case again
For I am a stranger
And a rambler.
I made love to you
One last time, kicking
My boots against the pines,
Scowled at the Schoenbrunn
As I passed on the tram,
I hated the Empire
And the children wide-eyed
Telling me about their
One-vote parliament
And I wheeled my case
Along the cobbles,
Into the number 78
To the Sudbahnhof.
Suddenly the blue hollow eyes,
Uncurious, unassuming, gazed
Once more at the traveller.
But when I travel now I am
Forever exile.
Sometime I wonder if
Everyone in Wien must be
An exile, it seems the mean,
Freud and Schoenberg, and can I
Please have a plot in the
Zentralfriedhof cemetery with the
Exiles if I am dead when I return.

Here the air is hot, I stifle
To breathe, I wave a fan
And drink lukewarm water
And I dream of frost and
Scurrying into the Aida bar,
And long for gloves and hats
And murmur in my sleep,
Pronouncing your name correctly.
Wien,Wien.

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The last strings of the orchestra die down,
and the memory of the dark clouds
sear past the Opera House,
throwing sheets of broken-off metal
over the heads of the people
wrapped in dark coats,
who duck and pull their scarves close round,
and pray before the cathedral in Karlsplatz.I have lost you, Vienna, wrenched
from your outstretched arms
by the demon time, and sent
to a more temperate clime,
where life passes at an even pace.
The barometer of my heart
no longer measures your ups and downs,
while the warm sun of spring
shines on the glittering stone Mozart,
and the fountains weep.

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Vienna again.
Low sky white with cold,
grim set faces stoic,
tram wires buzz by disembowelled palaces.
I saw you on TV last night
singing Deutschland uber Alles,
your parks filled with rhetoric.‘Suddenly Vienna turned against us,’ you say.
Once I turned against you
for your imperial manières
and for the eternal kiss
that ended all romance.
In your giant halls I waltz,
watch the low planes descend.
Over another coffee with milk,
I cry into my hands
and watch Mozart twist away
while Wittgenstein has nothing
left to say.

On the train into Vienna the woman on her phone,
‘Where am I going? Vienna again.’ Laughed wryly.
You don’t choose to go to Vienna -
you are pulled there as if by a magnet.
You get on a train somewhere and end up
at the Sudbahnhof, desolate.
You lose a lover and have to go
To Vienna to look for him.
You win a ticket to the opera
Or there’s a Mozart fest.
Noch Wien,
Ganz Wien.

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