By Star Zahra
My husband and I are both writers. Our daughter, Zurain Ali is two years old. She’s crazy about Peppa Pig, loves to eat custard and absolutely enjoys school.
I wake up everyday except weekends at 5:30am, burn incense and get started on her lunch which I like to make myself. This cycle of routine can sometimes seem unexpectedly disruptive to the creative tendencies of a poet. It is hard for anyone to raise a child, and harder for someone who always seems to be miles away.
The silhouette of my reality can be defined as her. She pops her face into mine when I’m deep in thought. Her smile is penetrable and her eyes glisten with a unique understanding of the ‘now’. Children are powerful. They are the most original versions of ourselves. The purest and most unfiltered expressions of our humanity. Often when we forget our core, they have proven time and time again to be a sort of compass to that state of magic and light.
I tell you this though, they can drive you mad. The loud noises, the screams, the cries over nothing, the messy house and everything else these little people can roll out their sleeves. But, all of these, in its own way, are a reminder of the mundane. We are asked to be involved. To not be in front of this abstract canvas of affairs that defines our lives but to step into it; To take off the headphones and sing our own tunes; to move our bodies and accept the ordinary moments as they happen.
Our house is covered in art and books and antiques of years as they pass but nothing is like Zu’s soft palms, her head full of hair, the dizziness I feel when I sniff it. Everything becomes perfect.
“Today, I stumbled upon a ballet of leaves
A drizzling city’s miracle etched
In a vase-like sea.
My daughter draws her sense of the world
On the car’s glass behind me
Her thoughts morphed like spirals
Tie dyed in a wonderful “ohhh”
Ahead, the road opens into the passage of a poem;
Man and men,
And tall trees among taller things.”
(“A Ballet of Leaves” October 2024, Star Zahra)
