The Broken House

The house is not same anymore

After mother is gone,

It smells of emptiness and a strange abandonment,

That surrounds a temple,

When the idol is stolen

by some miscreant.

Children are going back to 

Their lives of everything that makes

One forget the lost, the family and the business of life that must go on.  Father has risen

Like a phoenix

From twelve days long fire 

and normalcy has gripped him

in its resilient arms.

Fghting for a dead mother is far more difficult 

Than a living one, deads lack the presence to assert their rights,

The single daughter looks on through the window and tries

To bear the pain of 

the dismantling of a  home, the gradual disappearance of it, 

And the strange purposelessness

of living without a mother.

MOTHER AND DEATH

Mother and Death

People say your time had come,

you died the best way

without troubling anybody

Without much suffering

You were fine the night before,

Talked to daughters and 

had your medicines

Your kind of death is a much aspired and coveted one, 

people get paralyzed and grow immobile, people suffer and make others suffer.

With a mother, logic and theories

hardly work, I only thought that

I will never see that beloved face again,

coming home, nobody will ask 

me to eat my food fast and then grow finicky over a shabby house

nobody will call 

me five times to come back soon

from the market,nobody will ask me to 

get blouses, pain balm, ear drop and

slippers for her, I will not know 

how to live,

without fighting for a sacrificing and

suicidal mother,who had become silent at some point of time longing for love and care,and growing indifferent

to life ,knowing that nobody had time 

and heart enough to love her.

The Twelfth Day

The Twelfth Day

It is late evening,

The maid has run away screaming

Rain rain, 

something inside, 

that lay parched, 

looks in anticipation,

The known aroma steams off

the warm earth and rushes 

to the interiors,

It is raining.

The first time mother is not there

when it is raining,

There is none anymore 

to tell joyfully, Maa, it is raining.

The house seemed very quiet 

in the day today

pronouncing that someone 

kept the air thick with her presence

despite disease, pain and dejection,

Silence tries to embrace the house

with its frozen stiff hands.

She,who came and sat 

and talked of dead people in the parental village,the tantrum of maids,

small home details, new ailments and daily quota of disappointments, Who refused to give in,

to diseases and heartbreaks,

The diseases ate her blood 

and marrow

and slowly kept feeding on her 

stressed heart.

There is an inaudible cry

that turns into sobs off and on

A guilt that gnaws at the psyche

that we never returned love for love

and allowed her to hurt and get sick

in silence, 

Of our negligence and nonchalance,

so much so that,

whom we call God 

could not bear it anymore,

and devised a way to take her back home in the name of

a stroke.