Dirty dishes
broken tea cups
festering laundry
a husband’s barbs
an untimely death
the rituals in its wake
pooja fasting
a son’s neglect
a daughter helpless
abandoned, dreamless
mother worries
that she worries too much
but I see her
when she calls no one
yet cries
over the phone
in irregular sobs
and tears worth
the last thirty years
she spent for the
men in her lives
the ones that tell her
that she is a creature
of a forgotten time
irrelevant and foolish
for this world.
