Her butterfly kisses
Fell me
I swoon Only to rise and find her
Gone
Her little legs running as fast as she can straight into grown up land
Today I'll go to school myself she says
All three and a half years in her brimming with confidence and pride
And I watch her take a part of my heart away with her
As she walks to school and the future
Without me
Mummy look
There s a slice of melon
Hanging in the sky
All silvery white
May i take a bite ?
Off you go
Mummy hoists her up and flings her skyward
She reaches up and catches the melon by the tip of her fingers
Clinging tight she tells her mum
Let go
I've got the melon
Mummy lets go
And she hangs there off the melon
Nibbling her way right through
Mummy I'm done she calls down
And jumps on shooting star
And shoots her way down back tobher mummy arms
A line of silvery white juice streaked across her cherry face
A silvery white orb tracing her path back to mum
And not a trace of the melon left in the sky
I watched a video of a holocaust survivor saying she forgives the doctors who experimented on her
I am forced to contend
again with the depravity of human beings and their magnitude
I feel unable to move, between these two extremes
The booming tuition industry tells me a few things
1. We are a very very competitive society
2. We have too much money and
3. We don't have enough time to tutor our be with our own kids
She strides across
Her umbrella a shield
Against the onslaught of cars
And they all stop
This is tolerance
Walking through plumes of smoke of offerings to vengeful hungry Chinese ghosts on my way home
Side stepping paper "money " and joss sticks and oranges
Breathing in black smoke striving not to breathe in black smoke
Because the majority believe in burning to please their ghosts hungry even in death
We have our first female Malay president
We should be celebrating
But we are not
Recent world events have highlighted that the lay people cannot be trusted.
Democracy will always be unfair to the minority for we have primeval urges to support our own kind. Rationality cannot overcome biology. The hard science of our bodies. At least... that is what our govt believes. And maybe it is right.
So where does that leave us?
We shouldn't underestimate the lay people's urge to feel included though. A delicate balance or it could go the way of autocratic regimes.
So we had a presidential (s) election to quote cherish george. I think he's naive to imagine the majority would have voted her in against a chinese.
Under the shade of two Intertwining trees
Branches thin like then kulal
The smell of new cut grass floating her up
Sunlight through spiral spaces
Trees fluttering with the call of birds at dusk
About the wheels of time
Metaphor of a steam train
Taking her back to the beginning
And she steam rolls past atrocities
Wwii
Wwi
War of roses kind of wars
Adam and eve at last
To the very very beginning
She's pure
In a speech to the House of Parliament in London earlier this year, the British-Pakistani actor gave his case for representation of ethnic minorities in media. “If we fail to represent, we are in danger of losing people to extremism,” he said. “People are looking for the message that they belong, that they are part of something, that they are seen and heard and that despite, or perhaps because of, their experience, they are valued. They want to feel represented. In that task, we have failed.”
Riz Ahmed winner
Every day He paints the skies
In different colours
For us to admire if we have the eye to
Hues In blue and purple and white and pink and orange and refs
Everyday a brand new canvas
For us to behold
No arrogance or pride on his part
Just another days work
He rises white hot
Then descends with a crimson sigh
Every morning he stretches out with ruby tinges
Pinks and purples swirl through the blue
He rises steadily white hot blinding searing above the clouds at noon
Then he plunges with a crimson sigh
Onto his inky bed among the stars
Draws in his bronzed arms and rests
Refreshed he rises,
Blushing on top toes
to kiss the clouds again.
I live in a dump
Surrounded by towers of things
Teetering over me
All round
Piled high
No fixed places for things
Except On top each other
EVery surface mysterious under the weight of myriad colours
Crowded flowers on curtains
Next to Paintings of yellow and blue and red on pink walls
Behind red laundry fishnet baskets
Under clothes rising in soft insistent steps
Beside a table pink
Under piles of paper - competing towers of Pisa
Behind a chair
With jeans and jibba hanging off it
Across the desk pink
Under a world of things things things
Over me
I sleep on my face
And imagine a world
Where everything resides inside cupboards and drawers
And rooms neat
Nightmare perhaps
How do you catch a cloud and pin it down
Can you hold a wave upon the shore
Can you catch a moonbeam
Is asking to hire people who can speak Mandarin for art class discriminatory practice?
What if it's to cater to main land China students ?
The hand that leaped to slap the face
Left then right then across the back
Hard
Cannot be recalled
The kisses and caresses after,
The chips and chocolates
just paltry excuses
For the hand that hit the child
The child leaps at the younger
A tiger roaring at a tiny wrong...
The fruit does not fall far from the tree.
You leap you roar you hit
A mirror unto me
Watch my mouth foam
My eyes' hard glare
My hand the whip from nowhere
I have both
made and unmade you.
My dad roared I roared you roar
A family of dangerous jungle cats
Eyes gleam wildly
The thin veneer shimmers
Only a skin away from the step into too late
I pray I hold back that hand...and thus pull back your hand
And stay safely on this side of love and sanity
The hand that hit the child
Cannot be recalled
I find myself speaking differently now
Lile Sylvia
My new found idol
I'd rather be
Happy and uninspired
Than endure such depths of misery that leads to such brilliance
My hear reaches out to her 50 years ago
----
You Daddy beckoned and you left
Thunder crumbles (the inky imgae dissolves)
You are forever 30
Young beautiful genius
Truly risen from.ash
To live forever
Born and reborn
In minds of the unborn
A flash of yellow flits across my eyes
A leaf flying like an arrow for a tree
The golden Orieole rests on its branch after it's dash across the high way
She offers me a cup
of love, overflowing
all three and half feet of her
She curls herself snug
into the shape of me
Aatha don't die
she whispers sleepily
My little one is a sunbeam
You cannot catch her or hold her
Only behold her
Revel in her warmth
Her sunny michevous smile
And thank God for her
Respond to sujata bhatt poem
Intricacies of language
Cadences and flow
Tamil ancient language mocked by so many today
Saral such a specific single word
That conveys the cools refreshing misty spray of rain
Vanthuraen.. reassuring in Tamil semi comical in English
Pedagogy is key
How to be future ready
1..Depth of language
Shades of meaning express nuances
Abstract ideas
Conjecture imagine
Grammar not as important as love and depth of language
2. Intersection of disciplines
Concepts in other fields
Language must adapt. Adaptability if language
Language is evolving constantly. Organic. Ensure we don't kill love.
Some singlish words are so precise nothing else can say!
English is lingua franca because of its flexibility and adaptability. .
Language must be adaptable in a vuca world
3. Diversity
English now belongs to no one and everyone.
Really? Is it not our colonial masters language?
Not if we make it our own.
Riding the waves of disruption
Language must enable us to think creatively
Humanities coming back in now
Literature and language intersect woth technology
Successful video game writers studied literature
Story archetypes .
Literature and coding
Biology and mechanics
My question then - creative writing how much time should spend on this. Honestly writing compos is different from creative writing . Include creativity and writing
Listening to subtext
Musicality of language
Story telling
https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=10155714082876202&id=573881201
So the gov is giving out money for staying together very 10 years. So sad. We have come to this
31st August ! Lego place and lunch at gokuls
1st Sep - cars
2nd sep - fireworks
3rd Sep - Lexus hills park
4th Sep - surprise party and night safari
5 Sep - horses and coney island
6 Sep - hasinis house
7 Sep - swimming
8 Sep - tickle tickle and kanna house
Limbo
limbo like me
limbo
limbo like me
long dark night is the silence in front of me
limbo
limbo like me
stick hit sound
and the ship like it ready
stick hit sound
and the dark still steady
limbo
limbo like me
long dark deck and the water surrounding me
long dark deck and the silence is over me
limbo
limbo like me
stick is the whip
and the dark deck is slavery
stick is the whip
and the dark deck is slavery
limbo
limbo like me
drum stick knock
and the darkness is over me
knees spread wide
and the water is hiding
limbo
limbo like me
knees spread wide
and the dark ground is under me
down
down
down
and the drummer is calling me
limbo
limbo like me
sun coming up
and the drummers are praising me
out of the dark
and the dumb god are raising me
up
up
up
and the music is saving me
hot
slow
step
on the burning ground.
Limbo
Limbo like me
Bend over succumb
Yet not
For the mind is free
Even when the body isn't
How is language a sufficient affront to the years of inhumanity endured ?
English language now belongs to no one
Answers to no master and to all masters
My lah is mine. My appreciation of Tyger Tyger Burning Bright is mine too
The language
Answers to no master
And to all masters
Limbo
Limbo like me
Bend the language
Mould it to me
Long dark deck and the water surrounding me
If i dream in English the language belongs to me
Stick hit sound
And the ship like it ready
Break break break
is mine still steady
Written during the height of apartheid
About a time before the apartheid ..what does the text sat
1. Does it hint at the apartheid to come
2. Did it help with the end of it 10 years later
Qn 1.
Blatant racism
Master
Uncle
The boy in the blue shirt
Better remove a white boy from coloured hands than let him grow in love
Identity crises
Good coloured
Bad whites
Bad coloured
Good whites
The search for identity
Reconciliation
Qn 2
Maybe.
There are some books that i just hate
Hate so much
Like a monster calls
Like everything but the brain .
Books that reveal life so fully so fully
When do you have hope and when do you let go?
Like my worst ever fears
Of my parents growing old
Of me not being able to save my kids when I am called to it. That I will just stand there useless like I did the day Akshaya fell down from her scooter and hurt her face near her eyes so bad
That day scared me. Scarred me.
I have to write
I'm feeling a little low
Maybe coz my good friends - one of my oldest and best friends is leaving. Just last year or was it the year before i wrote the same thing
How I felt a hole in my heart as cliched as it sounds.
Just so
Life is like that
Break heart break
For they leave
Leaving a gap
That can be filled only once in two years or so now
The baby of our group will grow to be a teenager far from me
The creative genius too
The wise cracker in the group
The best and most creative chef
All gone to another land swings taking us further afield
I had the most lovely birthday celebrations.
Akshaya planned everything . Kept it a total surprise! Baked a delicious lemon cake with wiwit who made yummy coconut cookies . Planned the surprise with saro so theybwould know what time to be ready. Sent the younger kids to my mum's house so they can get the stuff ready. Am so very touched.
Then we went to the night safari. Amazing time!
