Hummingbirds, My Mothers hair, Ticking

Written by Mona Arshi at September 12, 2012 11:00

Mona Arshi was born in West London but raised by Sikh Panjabi parents, so she was steeped
in the culture of the East. She had trained and practiced as a lawyer for several years and so
was used to employing language in a fixed and rule-bound way. She started writing poetry in
2008 and it quickly became an attempt at expression which was the polar opposite of her
profession. What drew her to writing poems was the fascination of suspending intentionality
for the most part and instead to use language to allow creative accidents to take place. There
was also recognition on how a poets multi-voicedness is an important part of what inspires
poems.
The consequence of the hyphenated identity meant that she is naturally drawn to
the ghazal forms, being steeped in traditional western forms and poetics.
(The ghazal is composed of a minimum of five coupletsand typically no more than fifteen
that are structurally, thematically, and emotionally autonomous.)
The beauty of the ghazal is partly its rather intriguing form. But the mood of the ghazal is
preoccupied with the intensity of loss, melancholy, but lacking the emotional unity that
pervades western poetry.

Hummingbird
Ask the stems in the glass to bend. Let
Your fingers fly, a momentary grasp then
slip into spaces, surge in and out of folds
where breasts begin to curve and rise.
Be God. Press your curing skin to mine,
dissolve and pronounce me. Let my eyes
fall out and embed in the carpet, rooting.
Let my hands arrange the air for you,
braiding. Reluctant sun at the window, open
your eyes burn through the dense haze with
your severe love. Slide open the bone-zip of
my spine, anoint each rigid peak, take my
limbs and fold me over. Heres my mouth,
hummingbird, linger there, and hold
my breath.
(Winning poems from the 2011 competition were published in Magma 52)
The poem was written after a period of time when Mona was writing very little but reading
lots of poetry, including ghazals by Agha Shahid Ali, Ghalib, and Fiaz Ahmed Fiaz. She then
attended an Arvon Course where she began writing a series of poems, quiet, reflective poems

and found that the ghazal was the perfect vessel for containing this emotional strain. So
Hummingbird began life as ghazal. As the poem developed, the form needed to loosen and
give way. Many readers of the poem have referred to the poems erotic voice. The poem
dwells on intimacy but the kind that overwhelms and teeters on the brink of colonizing you.
Looking back at the poem, it breaks lots of rules and takes quite big risks: the Hummingbird
flits around from one disconnected image to the next, which is the ghazals influence. It is a
poem borne out of cultural connectness with a form, and the growing awareness that one is
able to leave it behind if necessary.
Now, Mona is working on her first collection and this poem won the first prize in Magma
Poetry Competition of 2011. Her work has also appeared in Poetry Review.
When it comes to the basic analysis of the poem, we can see that the theme of the poem is
love. The tone is quiet and smooth but full of images and metaphorical expressions of love.

My Mother's hair
My mother's thin salwar gives her away.
Her plait snakes across her back, and turns
to whispers at the ends.
Can we touch it? They ask in the icy playground.
She shyly places the dark coil in their hands.
After bathing, it is transformed, rope
released from its binding fibres and falls
into a heavy curtain onto her shoulders.
Steaming by the old radiator, she sits,
with her pan of dried pulses,
discarding tiny masquerading stones,
she leaves a trail of whispers on the floor.
[Published in Southbank Poetry Autumn 2010]
This poem is related to the mother obviously, but not only to the mothers hair but the whole
appearance. Mona first gives the description of the mother, how she looks like, what she is
doing, where she sits, what she has in her hands etc. Here I can see only physical appearance
of the mother and hardly can we conclude from these lines her thoughts.
It is easy to recognize from this poem that Mona has origin from South and Central Asia
because while she is describing her mother, we can see that she wears salwar that is a
traditional dress of Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Ticking
i.m. Diane Pretty
They lead me (nervous and suited) to the
living room. She's all peachy toed and rimmel-red
mouthed smiles. Machines grind and wink, but
if you listen with care you can hear that her body
is ticking, then cracking and oozing out her liquid
life, onto the carpeted floor. She is now an interpreter
of silence, can read the walls unease, reveal why the
silvery sounds of dawn rasp just for her.
She is aware that she is being edited, imperceptibly
nibbled by tiny fish, and contracting down to this
verse, this line, in the papers "I am Diane-Help me."
[Published in Magma Magazine in Autumn 2012 (Issue 51)]