Day of the Dead
I
When my mother was on the brink of death
Struggling days on end, desperate for breath
Reduced to a mere skeleton of skin and bone
Clinging on nothing but intravenous drip tone
At the same time I gained a weight of ten kilos
As if her loss added to me, nothing gone in waste
I was praying, guilty inside, with pathos and philos
“Haste, oh God! Deliver her from suffering!Haste!”
When she came out of the crematory
She weighed less than a pound, as ash
Collected in a marble urn clad with a yellow sash
To be buried in a cubicle tomb amidst a cemetery
We should have gone fast, to grief the dead
But my brother went on a dining date instead
Then came the rejoicing feast after funeral
Life was to continue for the living, after all
Now I am another ten kilos overweight
Every meal I overeat, for her the dead
As if I am beside myself,living in her stead
There is something of her in me await
Day of the Dead
II
Our sincere thanks to those dead bones
Who ventured their lives to the hap zones
testimony for us living as to what’s wrong
And what is right, and what is good
Those who first caught and slaughtered crabs and octopus
And came luckily alive to break the auspicious news to us
And those who plied and tried fugus
Died to alarm us, “it’s of deadly blood!”
The Tibetans feed their dead to falcons
In hope that their souls soar to heavens
Mongolians leave the bodies to wolves
To incarnate to another life that revolves
In the old times the corpse fertilized earth
however their lives count, it’s their last worth
Now they are burned to ash and end up cased
In porcelain or marble for keep and worship
Too many die bedridden in their last day
An uneventful life and eventually decay
No, such is not for me! Let me take liberty
To try new appliance or fly to outer space