My Mother
My mother is a haunted city –
A fallen realm
Utopia – lost to the war of tendencies
A wasteland roamed by ghosts and vagabond demons
Now, everyone who walks by, stops by the ocean
And weep; they wail, eyes glistening with elegies;
Strangers and neighbors shake heads in apathy
Dragging to mind montage of robust memories
Chetanne was an island surrounded by an ocean of bliss;
littered with coconut and sweet pomegranate.
Her economy blossomed – beauty and bound
My Negress; a chocolate diamond; her eyes were tidy stars
She had teeth of gold and tusk for a nose
Her smile ushered seasons, and her laughter echoed eternal
Here, love grew on trees, and bamboo rustled her melodies
My father was a sailor, a pirate - the epic rebel
And long she had dreamed of an enigma rising from the ocean – she loved him
And things fell apart
My mother is wreckage: scattered to the waves, and
buried in ageless tides. She lays waste and waning
The pirate fell to his past, as many others like him; and
She shaved her head bald till they shone like full moon
Her children eloped to distant colonies, ashamed of her
They live in caves and castles and dungeons and bucolic tents
She reminds us of the ugliest, most repulsive truths we dreaded
The new world is shiny and urbane, and mama didn’t fit in
No one wears sackcloth to a feast or burial-garb to a wedding
Mama is the darling nightmare we glimpse to remember who we are
My mother is a haunted city; she lays here, a wasteland
Imploring dawn, when night undoes the gothic tethers of desolation
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