A MOTHER’S GRIEF

She is a mother
Like the million others
She has cared too,
Fed him from her two.
But destiny and fate are two cruel brothers
Never have they been anybody’s mate
They stare straight at the face of the woman they ate.

Neither your words nor mine
Comfort an inch of the mother
Who is supposed to be holding her child in flesh
And not his photograph in frame.
Just pain,
pain,
pain,
and here comes another bout of her petrifying pain,
I try to look at her,
And I realise – agony fills her eyes,
Mine fill with dread
Heart bleeds of a mother-
Who, on motherhood never tread.

I come to her and I sit with her
And then I leave.
You come to her and you sit with her
And then you leave, too.
I believe, a dozen people do.
And I think about
The long, scary, heart wrenching moments when
She is alone
With nothing but a flash here
And a flash there
Of a piece of her body
She once gave her whole body to.
A million mothers cry
For such a mother
A million more
Over her ill-fate.
Hear me, they will never stop
And neither will she.

-Fanoos

About the author: Jhanvi Sabharwal, who writes under the pseudonym of ‘Fanoos’, is wonderfully adept at putting grave notions in her poetic works. The themes of her works are centered around feelings that gnaw at one’s being.