A place for poetry: Teaching presents from my Aunts in Pakistan

i. London E7 Walking to work from the tube, the High Road rattles with metal shutters rolling upwards. Pavements become coastlines from elsewhere: boxes of plantains, dudhi, arvee; hunks of watermelon piled in a crate. Long rolls of sari cloth lean against shopfronts, offcut squares in baskets. One day I buy one, unfold it in class like a map, pass it round. Its blue is that of schoolroom globes; silver threads cross it like shipping lanes. I ask about their aunts, their gifts from Lagos, Ilford, Manila: lifelines cast from somewhere to now. ii. Cumbria I drive to work down hedgerowed lanes, recycling lesson plans in my head. This morning, I found the fabric, a fragment from a decade ago, pressed in a ringbinder marked Poems. Different pupils run it through their fingers. I show them Googled images of salwaar kameez, Lahore. We are answering questions – Discuss. Compare and contrast. I try to answer them, see myself, then and now, staring through vertical blinds in Year 10 English classrooms.