Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- The Lion
- Entomological Specimens
- Practising Your Skills
- Insomniac
- Taster
- What Every Girl Should Know Before Marriage
- Bad Day in the Office
- You Are Not
- The Gold Bangles
- My Mother's Hair
- ‘Jesus Saves’
- Ticking
- On Ellington Road
- Cousin Migrant
- The Daughters
- Different Principles of Enclosure
- Day Ghost
- This Morning
- The Bird
- Almost September
- Phone Call on a Train Journey
- Small Hands
- In the Coroner's Office
- April
- 18th of November
- Notes Towards an Elegy
- The Urn
- The Rain That Began Elsewhere
- Gloves
- My Father Wants to be a Rooftop Railway Surfer
- Ghazal
- Ghazal
- Ode to a Pomegranate
- Bulbul
- Parvati Waits for the Return of Shiva, After the Slaying of Ganesh
- Lost Poem
- Large and Imprecise Baby
- Wireman
- Barbule
- The Found Thing
- Woman at Window
- Mr Beeharry's Marriage Bureau
- Mrs M Unravels
- Hummingbird
- Ballad of the Small-boned Daughter
- Acknowledgments
Ballad of the Small-boned Daughter
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- The Lion
- Entomological Specimens
- Practising Your Skills
- Insomniac
- Taster
- What Every Girl Should Know Before Marriage
- Bad Day in the Office
- You Are Not
- The Gold Bangles
- My Mother's Hair
- ‘Jesus Saves’
- Ticking
- On Ellington Road
- Cousin Migrant
- The Daughters
- Different Principles of Enclosure
- Day Ghost
- This Morning
- The Bird
- Almost September
- Phone Call on a Train Journey
- Small Hands
- In the Coroner's Office
- April
- 18th of November
- Notes Towards an Elegy
- The Urn
- The Rain That Began Elsewhere
- Gloves
- My Father Wants to be a Rooftop Railway Surfer
- Ghazal
- Ghazal
- Ode to a Pomegranate
- Bulbul
- Parvati Waits for the Return of Shiva, After the Slaying of Ganesh
- Lost Poem
- Large and Imprecise Baby
- Wireman
- Barbule
- The Found Thing
- Woman at Window
- Mr Beeharry's Marriage Bureau
- Mrs M Unravels
- Hummingbird
- Ballad of the Small-boned Daughter
- Acknowledgments
Summary
I've woken in this fearful flood
I've woken in the water
Oh mother did you put me here,
your first-born only daughter?
And can it be that the fishes here
are nibbling at my flesh?
And can it be the sun I see
that faces me in death?
‘You are as beautiful my Jaan
as the words or tears I'll shed’
as she warmed the blade against
her cheek, fine as silken thread.
She disarmed her tongue with one
fine stroke, father held her down.
Then a gloved fist, sealed her in
and dropped her in to drown.
At first the light protested,
strained to touch her face,
yet she died again in the waters
like a disappearing voice.
For six long months she lay like this
whilst the air pulsed with life.
Then in February they found her
under a rippling rod of ice.
The mourners came to pay respects
the mother wailed in white.
The mother had rehearsed sadness
in the mirror all through the night.
Sometimes her daughter came to her
in snow or quiet weather.
She avoided the ghost who smelt
like her small-boned baby daughter.
She couldn't ignore flakes of skin
and hair filling up her bed.
Nightly she lifted the black strands,
then went to sleep and bled.
Unwieldy daughter let me be!
She cried with her voice of wire
You despised all filial duty –
it's the devil you admire!
One day when the grieving mother
was blowing on her tea,
they came for her and the father
and asked them how they'd plead.
We know not how she met her fate,
how she claimed her watery bed.
The only crime we're guilty of
was not to see her wed.
Screens showed the trial in detail,
we followed every note.
We learned about her bloody death,
how they practised knots in rope.
And yes the parents were found guilty
for this was a tale of sin
but who grieves for this girl of seventeen
if not her kith and kin?
Sometimes on a September path
when you're near or hear the water,
press your minds to the open sky,
think of the small-boned daughter.
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- Chapter
- Information
- Small Hands , pp. 52 - 53Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2015