She saw him working throughout the day,
With the setting moon and the rising sun.
She knew he was transformed in every way,
But was she happy even after she had won?
For thirty long years of their marriage,
She had been chanting a single prayer,
To have in him a genial husband,
Who’d give her family the required care.
The prayer has been finally answered,
At the cost of a very precious pearl.
There only son lies in the coffin,
Taken away by the wars of the world.
He has taken this loss as a severe retribution,
A punishment from the inevitable heavens,
To a drunkard on the wrong road with many aberrations,
And had to face his son’s expropriation.
Drinking is not his habit any more,
But he does not speak like he did before.
Earlier she had to wait for him to return from gambling,
Now she yearns to see him enter the house smiling and rambling.
For him this was the only way,
To pay for that immutable past,
He wishes that time would sway,
And he’d go back to retrieve all that was lost.
She is standing by the weeping door,
Afraid to cross this moaning threshold.
There is a girl in impeccable white,
Who was to be his son’s wife.
The girl has not shed a single tear,
All she wants is to be there,
In the house of the guy she loved so much,
His memories are all she can feel and touch.
Her presence in the house is taken as curse
An anathema that’s socially unacceptable.
As long as she has his mother’s love in her purse
She will not consider her position debatable.
So she is the mother and the wife,
taking care of the people who were her son’s life
Her soul is stifling within, immured by the heart wrenching pain
That she is trying to hide but all in vain.
She can see her child, dressed in his beloved uniform,
Telling her with the same placating smile
“I miss you mom, I wish I could have taken you to the prom,
But they need you more, to successfully cross the dangerous Nile.”