Kirstie

Catherine
Her love is poetry and language, but Catherine pays the bills by working in communications and arts administration. Of late she has engaged mainly with young people -- in the schools as a tutor and teacher of English as a second language, and at ArtScape with a most creative and dynamic bunch of artists. These people represent the creative force for the future. In them is the energy that can reassert a positive influence in the universe. Through them, and her daughter, Lilly, she has hope. (And believes all this on a good day.)

From Illuminations: Qasida Variations
by Catherine Matthews

Part One of Twelve

Each breath of a pale blue bird expands and contracts the chamber in my chest. Each breath is a beat; each beat is a sigh I cannot contain.
You hear it, this sigh? It resonates. It is: the plucked string on the violin, a mantra, a guitar chord, a piano key, a low voice beneath my window. It is the spiralling sound of seawash in a shell and the chorus of sand that descends and descends in unstoppable cascades from the hourglass inner ear.
Do you hear it, my little blue bird, from where you rest deep in the chamber of my chest?

There is a place in my chest,
a bird nests there.
It is pale, blue and silent,
feathers still.

I was unprepared to accommodate you, pale friend, leery to risk such intimacy. For you, within, are all seeing; onyx eyes reveal long held secrets. I am naked before you.
As is the planet; its textures various, its dark side unveiled. Rain melts icecaps, volcanoes erupt, dunes fill heart valves with their grit, funeral pyres layer residual ash.
Do you feel these things, my blue bird? Feel the elemental scrape and claw of time across your back?

There is a place in my chest,
a bird nests there.
It is pale, blue and silent,
wings upturned.

The moon tonight is full, swollen with souls of the dead. Do you see it, little bird? See how it sits on the head of his gravestone? See how it grazes on marsh grass when it climbs the sky?
The flash of silver you see is not moonbeam. It is not you, my pale blue bird. You are still, immobile in the shimmer of the river. The glint is a jewel abandoned to the marsh. It mimics a fish, an S in the bend of night.

There is a place in my chest,
a bird nests there.
It is pale, blue and silent,
belly distended.

You gave no warning of your leaving. You exploded from the marsh like the reeds that whip the prow of the boat ferrying lost souls from water to sky. You clipped my heart to your wing and flew: a blue streak across the ochre moon.

There is a place in my chest,
a bird nests there.
It is pale, blue and silent,
feathers beat air.

You know of course I miss you; when you took flight I yearned to follow. But I await in silence, heart still. Perhaps another pale bird will replace you, settle into the place in my chest, stir in its nest from time to time, then squeeze out the bright white messenger of my eye.

There is a place in my chest,
a bird nests there.
It is pale and silent,
it is still.

Note: The qasida is a form of poetic language derived out of the dialects of Arabic. Comparable to an ode, the poem tends to begin with the evocation of a place or of a lost love. It is customary to call the poetry of this time (pre-Islamic) the diwan of the Arabs, the register of what they had done, or the expression of their collective memory.