Inspired by her mother’s death, and a life-long dream of writing, Pratibha Castle completed a BA in English and Creative Writing in 2011 at the University of Chichester. Graduating with a first class honours degree, she continued exploring on their MA in Creative Writing. Winner of the NADFAS short story competition 2009, age range 13 – 17, long listed for the Pighog Poetry Competition 2010, her work has been published in Eunoia Revue, Poetry and All That Jazz, Wales Arts Review, Thresholds Short Story Forum, a Hedgehog Press Anthology, Postcards from the Edge, and Fly on the Wall magazine Chaos. Further to her love of words, Pratibha, a former singer and holistic therapist, loves to garden, walk in nature, swim in the ocean, and experiment with food. She is currently working on a poetry collection, and a novel set in 1960s Notting Hill and India.
Pumpkin Blues
We collide at a pumpkin stall down Portobello Market.
You caress the silverblue
lustre of a Crown Prince,
I investigate the green mottle
of Kabucha, skin craggy, crumpled
as an old crone’s hopes
or rocky crevices about Olympus.
Yellow peel Turk’s Turbans glower in a pile.
We twirl, we swirl
beneath a hunter moon
into a dew glazed gloam,
tranced by the keen of a penny
whistle, banshee yowl
of a turf-fire fiddle.
Mammy cautions me not
to flaunt my heart upon my sleeve,
so I sit till after midnight,
illumined in her third degree
and first love’s fluster,
embroider right across my tit,
which you and later I will feel,
a plump crimson pumper,
brethren to the thorn snarled
muscle of the plaster Christ
enshrined beside the sapphire
Mary on the parlour mantle.
You wild eyed Ulysses. The twang
of your finger-lickin’ Gibson
plucks from me a young girl’s fancy
as the plight of your jeans, frayed
as nerves, suggests a stitch-up. I oblige
with bird track tack of rainbow hues infused
with moon-curse fantasies, disenchanted
come the morning
when I find you gone.
Pratibha Castle
First published in Eunoia Review