A Scar

DR. B.PARVATI

I have kept your memory
Alive in me my son,
My daughter’s twin
A decade went by since you left.
Six nights and five days you suffered
We who live love to speak of it.
Knowing not what suffering is
In this narrow world
Of hard hospital cribs.
I didn’t make them soft for you.
It never even occurred to me
To make you a soft bed.
You lived not on milk and love
But on needles and tubes.
Why did you enter my womb?
Suffering was our bond.
Never for a moment did I fondle you
Nor even touched you – ­
Except when you were no more.
You were gone forever.
Hunger conquered grief.
I ate hungrily and cried while I ate.
I wept. I cried. Slept on a soft bed–
­While your bare body
Chilled under the dark sky.
Your tender bones lay beneath the earth
And pricked my body in its warmth.
Memory is a thorn.
Life is for the living.
Your twin sister and brothers
Mean more to me
who have borne them
As did bear you.
Take the thorn away son.
In that distant place
I cast your frail fair body
To the open earth and open sky.
Your father, sister and I came away.
As we came, your hands stretched,
As the earth between us stretched,
Groping it seemed for my touch.
Life is for the living.
Take away the thorn my son,
It pricks when I am bleeding.