A memorial service before death

Adheena S Farhan

a house/ before it’s a funeral home/ is a pitstop for God.

a hot midafternoon always seems to linger/ past welcome.

I live in that part of the world/ where memorial services are never held.

Instead, we pool around the dead/ and become a tempest clawing at the dusk,

While they wait, in the white docks, ready to go/ Or not/ I don’t know.

A grandparent, his life unravelling into the season of exit/Is mostly the first encounter of death/ for most people with good, orderly lives.

Cancer had tugged at his long-lived skin, it had cut the back stitch knot/That kept the threads of a whole/ neatly, folded century.

Now coming undone/He trips on them, here and there, a memory, blown into confetti that had long fallen/ now no wind blows.

I, my father, my uncle and aunt, my mom and many/ hold as much as we can /In our pockets, and habits, and hilt of our lives/ we try/ to weave back an autumn /back to its trees/ but doctors said the pills are only for pain.

His eyes/ jaundiced/like odd eggs/hueless pupils watering often/ on yellow eyeballs /gathering the last of the world he will ever see.

It will be before he is gone /it will be before he is stone growing out of this world/it will be before that wet earth is only how he knows of the floods in our lives/ I will let him know/that life was pleased to meet him/and so was I.