Funerals.

By Drishti Kedia

Bury my grief within my body,

parts of which are parts of my mother,

so to say, my mother's grief is my grief,

and mine, mine.

It's a story so old,

magic mirrors and sad sunsets,

a lifetime for her, a moment for me.

And mother, your daughter is bleeding

and you refuse to believe it's yours

and you abandon poetry in a pond with prose.

Autumn falls and 

my tongue forgets 

the language it sings in,

and the birds forget their 

way home.

They tell me it'll be gone in a couple months,

but oh my love, don't you think

this night's too long?

Call me a non-believer

but my heart's praying 

for light and love,

off a haunted house if it may be.

It's a house, a home, regardless.

The ghost of a mother that my mother never was haunts me every waking moment.

The prose finally swallows up the poem, and the pond swallows up the prose. 

What's left is the still after the storm, a corpse of grief so heavy, it's washed ashore at my childhood home.

Maybe all I am

is a funeral 

of who I am.

By Drishti Kedia