Family Tradition — A Poem by Saba Zahoor
Saba Zahoor returns with a three-part (three-stanza) poem about three women from three generations who are intertwined by the blood they share and what they carry forth within and beyond family tradition.
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My grandmother in her own
courtyard of being—
wherein her sparrow frame
of wants sought a shoulder
and leant against
the decrepit trellises,
had her Chinar chopped down
and the wood fossilized
with walnut shells and flower beds
under millennia upon millennia
of the burial of her yearnings
and pressurised into coal
for her to burn.
And to keep burning.
For the good of her world.
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Her only daughter, my treasure of a mother
draped in a paisley pashmina shawl,
fond of forgiving,
ate olives, forgiving (unbeknownst to herself) their
foreign taste.
'Eat darling', she was told.
'Store and preserve
under the rocky sediments
of your new life.
Henceforth you will be pressed
day after day, without a moment's stop
in a millstone
by those who love you,
or don't (and hear this)
even by the fruit of your womb.
You will be pressed
for oil!'
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And then when I was born
I was shown the potter's dream;
earthenware and porcelain,
containing the coolness of eyes,
the secret ingredients of life.
Thick bottomed, steady
which the desert women carry;
who take to singing poems
to feel less burdened.
But who would've thought
the heaviness of a void
would outweigh the oxen's load.
It could rain all year round
and there still will be
famine in the soul;
and the dream rolling like a
tumbleweed before your eyes.
As the old seeress had once said of me
'Emis shu rattan baane lokut'
Rattan baane, the containing vessel;
the capacity to hold,
accommodate love
being small, inadequate
— the potter's dream fell limp on my dead eyes.