Photograph by Saily Gokhale
Indian Paradise Flycatcher
your tail two comets
of ice crystals
your face a night-
blue sheen
as if dipped
in starlight
your wings snowdrifts
from a past climate
you descend
in a heat haze
and when you dip
into a pool
you're a pen
sky-writing
on a mirror
a flick of flakes
melting
a jet's contrails
telling us
about a sun fuelled
by frost
Too fast for my eye
your tail streamers
weave an alphabet
to cool the earth
you dinosaur-relic
little white flag
from the Holocene
Pascale’s eighth collection, Tiger Girl, published by Bloodaxe in 2020, won an RSL Literature Matters Award while in progress. Her seventh collection Mama Amazonica, published by Bloodaxe in 2017, won the Royal Society of Literature’s 2018 Ondaatje Prize. Four of Pascale’s earlier collections were shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize. In 2018 she was appointed as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.