UDAIPUR BEAT

Margaret Eddershaw

 

I thought you had just a bronchial cough,

till the doctor bustled

into our hotel room -

folded in a bright sari -

with two side-kicks,

stiff in white

bearing,

as if in a Hindu ceremony,

the sacred ECG machine.

 

My skin feels again the hot flush

that engulfed me,

as they wired you

to the oracle:

arrhythmia

                        arrhythmia

                                                  arrhythmia

they chanted

and swept you away.

 

I don't remember speaking -

to ask where you were going

or even to say Goodbye.

I felt helpless as Shiva

waving those hundreds of arms

each with its own

unsteady                 pulse.

 

And hours later,

when you returned

nonchalantly,

slept naked beside me,

I watched your chest

through the night

rise and fall

                        rise and fall

                                                rise and fall.

 

---

‘Udaipur Beat’ won first prize in the Lupus UK Poetry Competition 2012.

 

About Margaret Eddershaw.

For 25 years, Margaret was a professional actor and theatre academic (Lancaster University).  She had published on Bertolt Brecht and theatre history, and had six plays performed at the Edinburgh Festival and in London fringe theatres.

In 1978, she was a founder member of Lancaster Literature Festival, and up to 1989, Red Rose Theatre Company, of which she was co-director, mounted eleven productions of contemporary plays specially for the Festival. 

Margaret took up residence in Greece in 1995, and began writing poems.  Since then, she has had over 100 published in magazines (e.g. Seam, iota, Interpreter's House, Envoi, Frogmore Papers, Orbis), in anthologies (from Blinking Eye Publishing, Boho Press, Bluechrome Poets, Ragged Raven Press, New European Poets, Cinnamon Press) and won a number of prizes (Wells Literature Festival, King's Lynn Festival, Petra Kenney Competition, Poetry on the Lake).  In 2010 she won third prize in the Build Africa Poetry Competition, an Excel for Charity competition. She has given readings in Athens and London.