Victoria Market

I’m going off prompt for a while, as there is so much poetry from the week’s workshop, waiting to be worked up.  Here’s what I wrote in response to a two-part exercise yesterday. We started off by reading some sensory poems from various
sources, and were then set to freewriting a list of places/events, remembered by scent or sound etc.  These were examined round the table, and then we were asked to write a “landscape” poem about one of them.  So the first part of this poem emerged, and was read and critiqued.  Then, we were asked to place figures into that landscape.  A lightbulb moment for me, and I was off, scribbling like a mad thing, memories whooshing in from all sides!  With only the most cursory of tweaking while typing the result into my laptop, here is the raw material for a memoir poem, opening up huge possibilities for mining my Seychelles memories.  I need to find pictures to accompany this, but no time – too much to do, for a change!

 

Victoria Market

The odour repels, yet draws me in
through the grandiose gateway arch in memory
of some bigwig; grubby egrets perched above,
necks drawn in, waiting patiently
to pounce on scraps of meat and fish.

A seethe of screeching, bustling, busty women
armed with huge plaited palm-leaf bags
jostle me in friendly fashion.
I can’t buy food here … ? can I?

An explosion of colour grabs the eye,
such fruit I’ve never seen.
‘Go on, taste it Madame.’
I do, gagging at the reek of whole jack-fruit,
drooling at the divine taste of its inner flesh.

Give the stinking, unsavoury butcher’s row
a very wide berth.  Ditto the fish stalls –
those fish must have been caught
as long ago as yesterday.  Look, their eyes
are cloudy.

II Figures in the Market

Like Piccadilly Circus, stand there long enough
and you’ll meet everyone you know.

Anne of the long black rippled hair and gentle nature
voice like a screech owl.  We chat about choir,
the problems we have
with intonation and finding the note,
the disaster dynamics –
all they know is fortissimo.

Margaret, big and bouncy,
very Grand Blanc, rather posh,
booms on about plantation days
and when can you come for bridge?

Tiny sparrow, sari-wrapped Susan.
Surprised, I am, to see her
in the middle of the morning, away
from her windowless sweat-shop kitchen,
preparing the twenty or so pungent dishes
on a roaring primus, to feed Dev,
aged mother-in-law, sons, 
arranged daughters-in-law,
and hangers-on, but not herself.

Scavenging dogs in packs
weave through the rickets-bowed legs
of idle gossiping men, crashing dominos
onto a stone slab table.
In a land of abundant fruit and fish
why would they bother with jobs?

III Aftermath

Driving home, loaded with exotica –
fruit and veg, herbs and spices,
fresh as all get out, I pass a beach.
A pirogue just landed, fresh
fish spread on the sand.
The babble of bargaining draws me in,
A huge bourgeois  for five rupees,
about fifty p in real money, a feast for ten.

Notes:  Victoria – capital of Seychelles
              Bourgeois – local name for a red snapper
              Pirogue – small slim boat with turned up ends, poled or paddled.