My last respects to the feet visible on the funeral bed
This touch is the last memory of Daddy for all his life.
***
Daddy! Daddy!!
Did your sins agonize?
Or your telltale hand on mother’s neck torment you as wounds?
Ineluctable throes
Before heart rests or life ceases!
How moving was your wailing unable to endure, as
You substituted the voice failed three years hence, with your fingers !!
Whenever tears well up for you….
Your keeping guard dozing outside the rest room
Boxing my back when I did not heed your word,
My sister and I playing merry-go-round with your hands, and
the cracking of our bones as you removed the body-pack, once a year, for Pongal, …
Are the few, little , hazy memories that flash in my memory-scape.
Whenever mother’s eyes filled with tears
I felt like burning you with petrol
But strangely, yesterday, I wished you were rather alive.
Forsaking your duties
Living only for yourself
What did you achieve?
Extreme pleasure…
And extreme grief.
You became a specimen for people … how not to be
And couldn’t be a coveted figure in any heart.
Didn’t I tell you that you will be relieved and everything would be alright?
Being aware that death is the only cure for you,
I told you to buck up and not to worry.
How can I forget, when can I forget
Those eyelids eagerly searching for me in the last hour?
Your pangs entreating to hold your hand?
You were a devil that put my mother to every hardship.
You were a father who no one would ever like,
But Yet, I felt a part of me had burnt to ashes.
When brother called ‘Daddy!’ into your corporal ear
I had an urge to shake you up and take you back home.
As the filing logs concealed your hands and bosom
I felt like crying you can’t bear that burden.
When I mercilessly awaited your skull to incinerate in the raging pyre,
The grief piled up to heart’s brim, had ultimately burst out.
....................
-Transalated by NSR Murthy
Original Poem "చివరి స్పర్శ" by K.Geeta
