Live Encounters Poetry & Writing 16th Anniversary Volume One
November- December 2025
Have you the time? – poems by Lynda Tavakoli.
Have you the time?
When you first came to the door
I offered you the time,
for that is what you asked me for.
I was ten, and you a skinny not much more,
with cheeks sucked in by some mysterious force
no ten-year-old might choose to understand.
The collar of your blouse had scarfed
a greying rainbow round your neck
to merge in seamless union with the pallor of your skin.
Later, when my mother heard you’d been,
she asked me what I’d given you.
The time, of course, I said,
for that is what you’d asked me for, or so I thought.
When you next showed up, I was at school,
but later on my favourite sweets were absent from the jar
and when I asked, my mother simply
pointed at the clock to mutter
something underneath her breath
about how time is never always what it seems.
And now I often wonder what became of you,
the worker’s girl whose name I can’t recall
because I never even took the time to ask.
Ghost ship
Out of a Tsunami breath you came,
proud for the winds to take you,
not with sail but only bulk to carry you along.
A year of days, a thousand miles of ocean
paint their terracotta wash upon your silent bow,
while Hokkaido mourns its errant child.
The Oshawa Seamount
oceaning your longevity on the waves
while the waters of Alaska drown your long escape
and feed upon the flotsam of your shrapnelled wounds,
thwarting the passage home.
In March 2011 a rusted, uncrewed squid boat, named Oshawa Seamount,
based out of Hokkaido, Japan, was cast adrift by a tsunami. It was eventually
tracked floating off the British Columbia coast, heading for Alaska.
© Lynda Tavakoli
Lynda Tavakoli lives in County Down, Northern Ireland, where she facilitates adult creative writing classes and has worked as a tutor for the Seamus Heaney Award for schools. She is a professional member of The Irish Writers Centre and has been nominated for Best of the Net and The Pushcart Prize. A poet and novelist, Lynda’s work has been published worldwide with Farsi and Spanish translations. She has been winner of a number of international poetry and short story awards and been published in numerous journals and anthologies including Live Encounters Poetry & Writing, Lothlorien Poetry Journal, , The Galway Review, Skylight47, Abridged, CAP Seamus Heaney Anthologies, Eat the Storms, Drawn to the Light Press, amongst many others. Lynda’s debut poetry collection, The Boiling Point for Jam received wide acclaim for its raw honesty and authenticity while her second collection A Unison of Breaths has been recently published by Arlen House.