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    The Meanest Flower
    The Meanest Flower
    The Meanest Flower
    Ebook96 pages37 minutes

    The Meanest Flower

    By Mimi Khalvati

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    About this ebook

    Inspired by Shakespeare’s songs, the short poems of Emily Dickinson, and Wordsworth’s Lucy poems, this collection of songlike poetry is based on the ubiquitous spread of weedslike the shallow rooting plants, small poems can grow anywhere. Featuring a number of traditional forms but also showcasing the ancient Persian Ghazal, these poems reinstate the joyful audible aspect of the lyric.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCarcanet Press Ltd.
    Release dateAug 1, 2007
    ISBN9781847777959
    The Meanest Flower
    Author

    Mimi Khalvati

    Mimi Khalvati was born in Tehran, Iran, and sent to boarding school on the Isle of Wight at the age of six. She has lived most of her life in London. She has published nine collections with Carcanet Press, including The Meanest Flower, shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize 2007, Child: New and Selected Poems 1991-2011, a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation, and The Weather Wheel, a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and a book of the year in The Independent. Her pamphlet, Earthshine (Smith/Doorstop Books 2013), was a Poetry Book Society Pamphlet Choice and her Very Selected Poems appeared from Smith/Doorstop in 2017. She has held fellowships at the International Writing Program in Iowa, the American School in London and at the Royal Literary Fund, and her awards include a Cholmondeley Award from the Society of Authors and a major Arts Council Writer's Award. She is the founder of the Poetry School and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and of The English Society.

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      Book preview

      The Meanest Flower - Mimi Khalvati

      Copyright

      I The Meanest Flower

      The Meanest Flower

      i

      April opens the year with the first vowel,

      opens it this year for my sixtieth.

      Truth to tell, I’m ashamed what a child I am,

      still so ignorant, so immune to facts.

      There’s nothing I love more than childhood, childhood

      in viyella, scarved in a white babushka,

      frowning and impenetrable. Childhood,

      swing your little bandy legs, take no notice

      of worldliness. Courtiers mass around you –

      old women all. This is your fat kingdom. The world

      has given you rosebuds, painted on your headboard.

      Measure the space between, a finger-span,

      an open hand among roses, tip to tip,

      a walking hand between them. None is open.

      ii

      Cup your face as the sepals cup the flower.

      Squarely perched, on the last ridge of a ploughed field,

      burn your knuckles into your cheeks to leave

      two rosy welts, just as your elbows leave

      two round red roses on your knees through gingham.

      How pale the corn is, how black your eyes, white

      the whites of them. This is a gesture of safety,

      of happiness. This is a way of sitting

      your body will remember: every time

      you lean forward into the heart of chatter,

      feeling the space behind your back, the furrow

      where the cushions are, on your right, your mother,

      on your left, your daughter; feeling your fists

      push up your cheeks, your thighs, like a man’s, wide open.

      iii

      The nursery chair is pink and yellow, the table

      is pink and yellow, the bed, the walls, the curtains.

      The fascia, a child’s hand-breadth, is guava pink,

      glossy and lickable. It forms a band

      like the equator round the table. The equator

      runs down the chair-arm under your arm, the equator

      is also vertical. The yellow’s not yellow

      but cream, buttery, there’s too much of it

      for hands as small as yours, arms as short,

      to encompass. Let tables not defeat me,

      surfaces I can’t keep clean, tracts of yellow

      that isn’t yellow but something in between

      mother and me be assimilable.

      Colours keep the line to memory open.

      iv

      Here where they’re head-high, as tall as you, will do.

      This is the garden in the garden. Here

      where they’re wild and thin and scraggy but profuse

      such as those ones there, these ones here, no one

      looking, no one within a mile, you’ll find

      flowers to pick and to press but before their death

      at your hands, such small deaths they make of death

      a nonsense and so many who would notice?

      with the best ones, flat ones, left till last, take time

      to take in the garden, the distance from the paths,

      the steps and the terrace crunching underfoot.

      Soon you’ll hear a whistle. The garden is timeless.

      Time is in the refuse, recent, delinquent.

      Go as you came, leaving it out in the open.

      v

      As if they were family, flowers surround you.

      As if they were a story-book, they speak.

      They speak through eyes and strange configurations

      on their faces, markings on petals, whiskers,

      mouth-holes and pointed teeth. They are related

      to wind. Wind is a kind of godfather, high up

      in

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