Antara Mukherjee
In your swell of a cream silk tussar,
itar-sprinkled, tuberosed, basil nosed,
I saw you leave,
awfully long,
before burning to ash
carried by the Ganges
like you could settle as the dust.
But your ash coursed through the rivers
lending your grit to fishbones
salt to the sea
pliancy to clay
and metal to the moon
that rose in the evenings,
ankling our spice-misted prism,
prodding us to look up
in the dark—
which you’d say, always
cusps into a dawn.
So, I had to look up, Ma
and I did
even when your ash moved my universe
to the ground.