The Kurdish Musician
She is swaddled in pink, sky-blue and veiled
in a gold hejab that with every chime
of her santoor dangles its fringe where trailed
on her cheeks hang coins that bob in time
to her nods, throb in a pause, sway to tremor
and echo. Poised on thumbs, twin hammers mime
a flurry of wings, two thin furred tongues that stammer
at strings, streaming a swarm of rising notes
not through field and hedgerow, blossom and clover,
but through space and stars to the huge black throats
of gully and scarp where all music is stilled,
hived in a dome, as she is, rapt, remote,
impervious to the here and now, hands filled
with flightpaths winging home. Through her who knows
what trails might meet or where pollen has spilled
strange hybrids take, scrub thrive or desert rose;
groundcover prove alive, on five dark grounds
now train its greening shoots? Or who’d suppose
in a London sky, pink, sky-blue, that has wound
itself in the sun’s hejab, in fold on fold
veiled its own dark grounds, she too could be found,
head in the clouds, while ours are fringed with gold?
