Mother’s Day
MOTHER’S DAY
I have traveled ten thousand miles with you,
From an apartment at the edge of the water
in a city piled high into the sky—
Stacks of cement boxes with bathrooms and bedrooms
Furniture, people, parrots, dogs, washing machines
And the rare laburnum tree with bunches of gold flowers
That breaks the steady state of squalor that marks these
Still beautiful Bombay streets—
To rural Virginia where in the spring, lace white pear trees
Make the world seem perfect, no underlying hint of violence
Or suffering to mark what is coming for each of us.
When you think of me,
Irritable, home sick, carrying my burdens badly,
Burying my laughter deep,
Don’t forget that I see a red cardinal shooting across a brown garden,
A piece of blue sky,
An orange sunset over a wide river.
When I think of you,
Lonely, too attentive to daytime TV
That keeps you connected to the outside world,
Don’t forget that I see
The laughter of generations in your heart
In languages so old all human secrets are safe with them
Turning yellow and stale with under use.
There are many things that make a life,
One of them is love, the acceptance I have of you.
But what of laughter, mother, will it not help
When it is the end and there is nothing to mask what is coming for us?
What will abide if my children do not know Gujarati
And cannot laugh with us at our old family jokes?
But then I look around the room and see
my children laugh a lot anyway,
Like wild flowers they find a crack in the concrete
to burst out and reveal that
The time has come to forgive myself for what we have lost
And learn to live again in a new country with pear trees.