Day of the Dead

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