I confessed that I cried
while reading bright dead things,
and my mother smiled
because I'm the delicate kind,
and said that I loved poetry the way my grandfather did.
Shuttered eyes, slipping into the realisation
that it's funny how spirit skips a generation,
and all at once I'm bleeding blue,
recalling the pictures of you,
coated in tears that wet my lashes
like grass in morning dew.
I dress myself in pearls,
from what I've heard,
they were his favourite,
and walk to the Siren's sea,
in honour of a memory
that's not taken from me.
Because I still see him in my cousin's face and every gentle soul I meet.
I greet him with our mirrored mannerisms and the phrases I repeat.
I treat him with every plateful of pomegranates and sugarcanes.
I feel him every time this desert rains.
I hear him in his many namesakes,
hear his absence ringing in my mother's heartaches.
I'm near him when I pass his Phoenix palm in our garden,
towering tall, touching his ghost in the seventh heaven.
And when it's my time to drop the curtain,
and my poem fades into the mist,
I'll step into the afterlight,
and tell him all about it.
Copyright ยฉ 2021 by S. Y. Kalindara. All rights reserved.
To my grandfather, I wish I had known you for more than five years. I hope you're at peace.
