All these poems are from 
‘Leaving fingerprints’ by Imtiaz Dharker
to be published by Bloodaxe Books UK autumn 2009


The missing piece

The whole world has shrunk 
into a puzzle.

Someone is piecing it together.
Someone else is looking over her shoulder,
the maker in a breathing room.

She is building the picture from the outside
in. First the gilded border, then the story
told in one more jigsawed piece,
the intricate teeth fitted perfectly 
to reveal the glass, the carafe.
Look now, here, the princess lost
in music, the women playing a drum, a lute,
eyes closed, bodies swaying.

She lifts another piece and hesitates
at a space where nothing fits. 
Over her hand another hand is joining in, a glove 
of sunshine from the other time.
And there they are, for a moment,
The one who made the puzzle,
The one assembling it today,
The ones who are being assembled,
The instruments they are, the ones they play,

all the hands poised above a hole in the world,
joined in puzzlement.



Leaving fingerprints

I know this frosted landscape
better than it knows itself, its layers 
a busy clock of history, still ticking.

Under my feet I feel the trail of the slug, 
the snail, the earth’s deep squirm 
around an anklet or an amulet, a broken cup.

Lost, the names of the ones
whose fingers made and used
and threw away these things, 

now dug in, clasped by roots, hugged 
to the earth’s chest, live. The worm’s heave 
and turn delivers messages up 

through folds of soil and mud, afterthoughts 
that grow to trees, trunks with arms,
branches with fingers, twigs with nails,

scratches on air, tear 
after tear on the white page.
These names have given their artefacts away

to be sparse as winter. Here I am, they say. 
Here and here for you to see,
fingerprinted on the sky.



First gift

Don’t expect a silver spoon from me.

I would give you this instead. 

A coral spoon from Turkey, fished out 
of the Marmara sea where mermaids 
dined off dolphins’ backs, flicking iridescent tails.

A well-used wooden spoon from Russia,
scarred by banging against a table, bean 
and barley flying past the infant’s crumpled face. 

A spoon discovered in Iceland, carved 
from horn and frozen in a spoke of frost, lost 
while the Queen of the Mountain tried to feed the Beast. 

A shell spoon from Macedonia, a dipper from Peru, 
a wooden ladle from Fiji made from the magic 
kava kava root to cause love in unexpected places. 

Each one fed another mouth 
and had good daily use. 

Of all the riches in the world 
I would give you only this,

a simple way to know their lips,

to feel the hands that touched 
the hand-me-down.



Ceremony

Bring me from New Guinea the branch of a tree,
the coconut shell, the snail-silver clod.
Bring me the root and the leaf and the pod
to fashion a birth with the hand of the dead.

I will work on the mask made of Malaga wood,
flesh out its face with fibre and mud,
ease through my hands its breath and it’s blood
and its half-shaven skull to remember the dead.

Draw over my head the Papuan lime.
Plant in my eyes the blossoms of fire.
Pull over my face the years of desire,
the greed of the living to honour the dead.

Let his soul pass out of quick clay and bone,
give him safe passage, make way through the crowd
with feasting and dancing and singing aloud.
Let his face live on mine when I laugh for the dead.



Landscape with poppies 

The sound was the best part, 
bubbling through the pipes,
the way breath and water
mix to make happiness. 

The old women collected
round the narghile, cackling,
puffing at the reed, till the smoke 
patted them on the head. 

The haze above them could 
belong to poets, but their verses  
were the names of neighbours, 
someone’s daughter, the cadence  

of a joke that made the 

other women laugh and slap 
a thigh or clap a hand 
across a malicious mouth.

Sometimes when they were gone 
I would put my mouth to the pipe 
and imagine being old 
and chortling as they did, wickedly.

But the chillum is standing 
in the cupboard now 
dusty with disuse, 
as if in disgrace.

I asked my grandmother 
the other day, ‘Shall I get out 
the narghile? Should I clean the pipes?’
But she shook her head.

‘The times have changed,’
she said. 



Seed-box

I am lying on my back 
in this wide field, the earth 
a drum under my heels, 
My horizon is poppies 
lit up by the sun.

These flowers are wrinkling tissue, 
fragile skin on stalks. I am waiting 
for the red to drop 
across my mouth and eyes. 

I am waiting 
for the surprise of sky 
when petals fall and pods 
turn dry, when the wind 
comes up and rocks 
my cradle of stems.

Then the seeds will jump  
and rattle inside their hardened 
box,

ready. 
Ready or not, here I come.