My parents sweet living angels of understanding and assistance
My parents fragile old frail from resistance
Providing us wings to fly away
And crying softly over our flight
Brooding over us tired with bent angel wings
Never breaking never missing a step or smile
Shelter and shadow sun and rain
My parents will never be here again
And my sad sad heart beats it's dull refrain
The same old chilling still refrain
Still will I remember
Father thy grace mother your love
Is lovely beyond all pain...
My parents will soon be a memory
Of soft sunlit hours of dawn beginnings
The wooden door implacable
Swings on its hinges creaking
Smiling it's soft bland chocolate smile
My dead father in law
A tall man fond of his child my husband
The grave is lonely for him these dozen years
Death is serious business
Dissolving past ownerships
of tenderness
I watch my husband's frolicsome smile
I shiver to think how adored he was
Held up in father' s arms and made much of
The way he now dotes upon my children.
Crossroads of life navigated carefully
My babies little hands safe in father' s grasp
And all this was done once
long ago
By a beloved dead father in a tomb.
Beat beat beat my dead heart beat
Hurt hurt hurt
My nightmare chest of memories
I sit upon your lid
Or else
The dead ancestors shall toll out
Stumble and tumble too lovingly.
The past hush! Not dead never dead
The past is crawling alive with people
Their loves their fears their shame their tears
Their hopes hates their thoughts
In our minds their heirs
And ever growing an eternal sphere
Continuity drawing them near
To Full Stop
Death.
It's a forget me not fest
How will I say I shall remember?
Dear daddy mommy
My entire life should I spend kneeling
To our undying past in dormancy?
Too beautiful mother
Too tormentsome father
remembrance and oblivion
Both
To remember is to forget your memory
Too truly beautiful to ever relive
your cool hands upon my forehead
Your lovely worn hands
The faded glaze
Time's peeling layers of
Youthful beauty and sleepy
Fadedness
Your bent bangles attached to glowing bones
Finally my mother your hands that held
With wrinkles your forehead flayed
I have started falling in love with displacement
I envision you fading even more
I can see you shrinking
Like the man next door
bending scraping
Bowing to tyrant time
Father I feel my heart will burst
with love
Full either the foolish wish to prolong time
My god you glow
Life is a neon sign
A star spangled banner in a black hole sky
Crazy universe put on a show
Dead grandfather
Your scribbles lights up my mind
Written one year before you died
An year before he passed the soft brown door
My grandfather' s words rings with ardor unquenchable
Time the cannibal cannot dim
That ring of love
His words ring like elegies
Upon my forgetting -gate
So gently
So swiftly swinging open the door
"Dear son take care. .of my little grandson.hope your wife and the little baby are well.
I cannot sleep at night knowing he is ill.
Take care son and keep them well."
And finally the final dearest line
The costliest line in this cheap universe metered by time..
"...and let me know soon, my dearest son."
We love our fathers
We love our dead
We love them so
They play in our heads
Till time cuts and creases and spoils the spool the thread
Their words dimmed and drowned forever
Their lives wilting in our rotting heads
O drown the dead
Let us take our kids to the park instead.
All rights reserved
(c) Amrita Valan 2014
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