Mother's Day Post

 Today is Mother's Day. I think.

So I want to write down this memory. The last week of my Mom's life I was working in Alwaye with my father-in-law, which is six hours from Thiruvananthapuram where my home was with her and Dad. I had my first job and would go Sunday night and stay in Alwaye in YMCA and come back on Friday. It was just two weeks I had been doing this if my memory is correct. So as I was going on Sunday the third week she asked will you come back by any chance before Friday? I said no Mom, will come back on Friday as usual, can't come mid week no? She said ok with her usual Mona Lisa smile that I could never fathom. So that week one day I was standing in class teaching Rabbi ben Ezra by Robert Browning which I had never before and it went "Grow old with me/ the best is yet to be/ the last of life/ for which the first was made."

It ended with these words: "So, take and use Thy work:

Amend what flaws may lurk,

What strain o' the stuff, what warpings past the aim!

My times be in Thy hand!

Perfect the cup as planned!

Let age approve of youth, and death complete the same!"

After teaching I went to the staff room and a message came that my mother had had a heart attack and was in the ICU due to a cardiac arrest via the phone. My father-in-law and mother-in-law took the car instantly and drove me down. I knew she was gone before the next call came because of the poem. Sometimes God lets you be right there with your loved one as he or she is dying and sometimes not but my comfort was the words of the poem which is why I believe God can speak to us not only from Scripture but at opportune moments through literature by great poets. The poem is a startling parallel to my mother's life in some ways who was a deeply spiritual person.

When she asked me if I would go back midway in the week by any chance did she know or did she not? I don't know, of course, I will never know, But the fact that I was teaching Rabbi ben Ezra while she was breathing her last makes me feel she did as it was a poem I had neither read nor taught before but as if made for her and to make me know what was happening somehow. Did not seem like any coincidence, strangely enough. I am not trying to put an(y kind of an) aura around this.

You can read the poem if so inclined.

TSL's Pandorathon May 8th Prompt Conversation between a Crow and a Parakeet

 TSL's Pandorathon May 8th Given by Santosh Bakaya - a conversation between a crow and a parakeet.

Crow: I am humble kin to Raven

eulogized by God and E A Poe and Ted Hughes and the Native American Indian

Parakeet: I am a member of the parrot family

They put me in cages, in groups, some of us

The humans

They are fascinated I can imitate their speech.

Crow: In India, they make much of me

I even appeared in children's stories

Parakeet: We exist beyond all this

They may go but we remain

Crow: Yes, but doesn't it irk you

to be bred and kept behind bars for ages?

They do not think me, fortunately,

So important, thank the Great Crow in the Sky for his mercies

Parakeet: The Great Parakeet in the Sky is probably not so powerful

As the Great Crow in the Sky, I guess.

In their story in Greece and India you are intelligent though ugly

Some believe you to be their ancestor

I have no famous tales on me

Yet somehow caught their attention

As I, unfortunately, can mimic their chatter

So meaningful to them and meaning nothing to me

Their Praise God and fuck you mean the same thing to me.

Although when I repeat it they wonder if I know that!

Hehehe, "what fools these mortals be"

Something I picked up from them from a chap called Shakespeare

Crow: We are all mortal

Parakeet: But they hanker for immortality

Crow: A strange concept

Parakeet: Let us stop discussing their ways and means

Foolish tyrants

Let me sing and you caw to a beat.