This poem was submitted by the author to, and published here by, Cultural Streams International.
I listen to wind in trees among drying brittle leaves
on this gloomy autumn day that chills my bones.
Sight of familiar items you daily touched bring tears
to my eyes in this haunted room that mourns your absence,
as do I, while muffled sobs fill the emptiness.
I bury my face in shirts hanging unused in your closet,
searching for one last lingering fragrance.
Yesterday morning I watched a squirrel chase his mate
round and round the sunlit big maple you so loved
and had to laugh at my twinge of jealousy
over the chattering attention of a simple squirrel.
Four seasons have come and danced away in the world’s
eternal cadence since you died, as alone I enter
my second autumn without you by my side.
Last fall and winter sped by on Teflon wings of denial
as I metamorphosed myself into the slender woman
you dreamed me to be again for so many years.
Spring began a slow fall from grace of my newfound self
as I tried to celebrate renewal without you in my life.
In a warm spring rain I gathered beloved crabapple
and fragrant white apple blossoms from our yard,
moist and full of shared memories, and packed them
among dry remnants of your ash and bone.
Days later on the other side of the world,
our daughters and I weeping with others
dispersed them into a small pond
at your Janai village home.
We gathered at
to honor your memory one year after your death,
where you began your life on this side of the world
and where you entered my life over five long decades ago.
We waded out into the sea to release small handfuls
of your ash with fresh marigolds.
I cried as waves, first playing with floating heads of flowers,
deposited a gifted string of golden marigolds
on wet glistening sand by my feet.
This September, our big daughter turned forty-one
in a new faraway city among strangers,
braving out her life anew in a freshly bought house,
reaching for realization of elusive dreams
both old and new, as our little daughter put aside
a five-year career and entered a PhD program to explore
rocks and rivers and the coursing of water
to a mathematical depth her mother will never understand.
Together we smile and cry at your memory,
how your passion for education led her to run
intellectual marathons past ordinary goals.
I drift from nostalgic daydreams back into the gloom
of this clouded cold October late afternoon.
I gaze through your window at wind whipping leaves from trees
onto the ground like weeping gold.
Day’s end of chaotic birdsong gathering outside
in shouted exclamations of home belongingness
calls out against the aching empty hunger
of my loneliness.
Nancy Ganguli