Fusion Stories - 4. Pey Colborne, aromatherapist and poet (Podcast)

Continuing the Fusion Stories series, in this podcast, I talk to Pey Colborne whose experience of both Eastern and Western cultures have influenced her work as an aromatherapist and poet.

Listen to the podcast with the embedded player below.

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• To find out more about Pey’s aromatherapy practice at Neals Yard in Bath - go to www.nealsyardremedies.com and click through to their shop in Bath.

• On the podcast, Pey reads one of her poems:

English is my Second Language

1.

Ghosted on a foundation of inscrutable whispers,

Restless meanings, rocking the cradle.

Sleep now, a lullaby of pictographs.

Dancing with the seagulls in my first

Encyclopedia of Birds,

White wings, black tipped, flashing in the blue sky

White dress, baby feet flashing in that blue heat

Flight and dreaming yoked together

As the many-names-of-things.

2.

Second language,

The ladder to my escape

The way out, the other world

I wrestled for it, asked for blessing;

Exile is an English name.

In banishment, a faint music still follows me

A bamboo scaffold, wobbly but strong

To build new rhythms in a journey (not home).

I go to China, place my ancestors worship,

I clamber around and wind its golden dragons round my thumbs;

Master its ways, gallop the horses of the steppes–

On a high plateau, dance with Generals drunken and fat,

In gold braid and red caps.

3.

I dream in tongues varied and few

In contemplative red mansions

In entire tales scried from a second’s being

In none, come the power of commonality

But in lonely fragments

Like us, seeking to be held close.

My first language follows me like instinct

Or a beautiful abstract

Entirely open in meaning

Unforceable and permeating

A stricken mute maiden

At my heels.

I’ve learnt to jump through the hoops now

I am my other tongue

Whether right or sinister–

Bound like a confident wave to the sea.

I feel the power and the draw of it

The sensual limning,

A careful adornment of bare bones–

Talisman and relic,

Dissecting the myth

Making it new.

Copyright Pey Colborne
Published in Magma 29 Spring 2004

• Posted on
  Wed, July 12th, 2006
• Author
  Yang-May Ooi
• Category
  • Fusion Stories
  • Poetry
  • Podcasts
• 2 responses
• Leave a comment
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