Recipe for a Birthday Far Away from Home

An unconventional birthday cake poem for a life with floating roots

Dance of the Flowers, by Ehab Hassan — Montreux, Switzerland © 2022 Suyin Tan

An unconventional birthday poem baked as a layered cake, winding through the textured layers of magic and melancholia that infuse a life with floating roots.

Featuring the complex flavours of separation from home by a distance that’s both geographical and emotional, it comes in the colour of yuzu and winter jasmine (which happens to be the chef’s favourite colour from the kitchen this season).

Served with a special tea pairing (to be revealed within the poem), to celebrate friends who feel like home.

𓇢𓆸

Yellow are the leaves fallen 
on the ground, shaken
off the tree – swept apart – 
from their roots – they shiver, 
invisibly

Yellow is the colour of memory’s
first tune, an ancient gramophone
playing in a frozen room, in the fading
light of secret longings – I look back to see 
no one who is following me

Yellow are her pages, a book fallen 
open, stories from one thousand 
and one nights spilling from her heart –
the words, they arrive all at once, and also
too late, forgetting to bring any comfort

Yellow is the colour that’s never been known
by the green leaves of olive trees that live on 
in your memories of home – but one day the sky
breaks open, alone, and all you see is bottomless
white, falling out from under a never-ending blue

Yellow is the smile of winter jasmine,
who has travelled across seas to bloom
in front of you and me, she sits in floral
dance next to her cousins, sweet oranges –
infused into the heart of a cake, we eat

We drink lemon thyme tea, and you tell me –

Yellow is the colour of a heart 
that glows in the dark,
showing the way home after 
the leaves have fallen, when 
the tree has whispered goodbye, 
in a language we can’t understand –

We drink yuzu green tea, and I tell you –

Yellow is the sun shining 
the weeping roots awake, to
discover we can keep on living, 
to find we can keep on growing, 
even when held by the hands 
of a different land – even then

                                                                     𓇢𓆸

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For —

𖤣𖥧 my dear friend, Ehab, who introduced me to the winter jasmine flower and taught me the meaning of home and roots,

𖤣𖥧 all my friends who feel like home,

𖤣𖥧 everyone who has tasted the magic and melancholia of a life with floating roots, and

𖤣𖥧 just anyone who likes cake, really, especially if it’s your birthday too — happy birthday :)

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