To Monua – Eleven Years Past

    
To Monua – Eleven Years Past
 
In the bitter cold of winter
In the northern climes, we pray
For the warmth of northern summers –
And the ones who’ve gone away…

For the life, we each are given,
We each in time return,
From age, despair or illness –
Or fiends that bomb and burn...

We're born, indeed, by accident.
By accident, we go.
And yet, although we're happenstance,
There's much we get to know.

And when our elders leave, our grief
Is deep – but when we see
The ones who're younger go before,
We wish we would not be...
  
******
   
On a Saturday, you left us –
Or on a Sunday morn,
On the dates returned this weekend,
Oh my sister, all forlorn...
 
And I wasn’t there to stay you –
But a continent away.
And this, I still remember –
In the silence, every day.
 
But if there’s still your spirit
That wanders, asking why –
With our parents now departed,
You should know, I’m coming by –

And surely, we’ll be meeting
And I will hold your hand –
And our parents might be watching
And they will understand.
 
And all your friends, your cousins,
Your elders, in-laws, more –
The ones you touched, who’re living –
Or gone, will come to know.

For you and I and others
Are ripples on a sea –
That though we each might vanish
Will never cease to be.
 
You lived a life of beauty,
However deep the pain –
And each of us is praying
We’ll find you once again.

******

And so – for every other,
Who has passed the “One Way” sign
And left behind another
Who can only pray and pine –
 
I write to you, my sister,
As they might write to those –
The ones, who're not returning
From where their fortune chose...
 
The bubbles meet and part and pop
And others take their place.
So parents grieve and siblings mourn,
Remembering a face...
 
We think with time the wound will heal.
But rarely is it so.
In every home, the sorrow comes
And never will it go.
  
2015 January 17th, Sat. 9:35 pm
Brooklyn, New York

In Memoriam
Monua Janah
1959 – 2004

And Where Are You?
 
http://thedailypoet.blogspot.com/2011/04/and-where-are-you.html

  
Immersion in the Ganges
 
http://thedailypoet.blogspot.com/2006/07/immersion-in-ganges.html


Jupiter Rising
   
http://thedailypoet.blogspot.com/2006/03/jupiter-rising.html
 
Monua in Boston
 
http://thedailypoet.blogspot.com/2013/12/monua-in-boston.html