The Last Dinner: An Elegy

That food still lingers on the edges of my tongue.

October invades, barbarous,

abrading hues from the walls of my mother's room

and the folds of her beloved sarees.

The corners, ignorant, did not know

that death had already hidden inside them.

Your wrinkled hands offering us morsels from your bowls

did not appear like goodbye gestures.

Your tinted eyes still taught us 

how to believe in tomorrow.

We ate, 

as if it were a grand eve,

little knowing it was a farewell to you.

My brain replays that dawn.

I imagine alternate endings, impossible corrections, 

everything that might have saved you from dying.

Yet guilt doesn't obey logic.

It settles in the ribs 

and burns like purgatory.

Since then,

my pen stumbles across paper,

paper that absorbes torments,

silence, absence,

and finally tears.

The pedestal has collapsed;

the bricks have invisibly fallen to the ground.

Life after that dinner feels like a drama

I'm forced to enact ,

for time, with a knife, has wounded a daughter's certitude. 

Slaughtered the symphony your motorbike made;

and the knocks of your hands on the door.

Still, I summon my belief,

You abide

in my first disquiet 

before leaving for an unknown city,

in dreams that warn me, solemn,

in the wind that shuts the door when I forget to close.

Bapa, here I write,

I write with trembling hands.

The last dinner roars underneath my soul, 

howls everytime I sit with my inkpot. 

Pardon, the meter and my unrhymed words.

May each comma, each dot on this page reach you, and the afterworld.