The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Mother Wound by Gauri Awasthi

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Another Failed Elegy

The other night, I saw you at the Delancey-Essex subway station,
crouched, crying, draped in your orange saree with white flowers
painted all over. The ones you picked from the verandah floor, mercy
of the neighbor’s Harsingar tree. I still don’t smell flowers I worship
with, out of habit. You always insisted that what is divine must reach
the divine first. Even when I knew your dead body was lying 7508
miles away in our drawing-room, I kept running into you. Even when
I couldn’t reach home to cut your fingernails one last time, with the
same attention, you braided my locks for school each day. Or embrace
you, remembering that I couldn’t find you at the door the last time
I flew back because your Alzheimer’s was getting progressively bad.
And maybe why I can’t write a poem about you not being here is
because so much of forgetting is remembering through words. And it
still feels like you’re here — in the Burman songs, in the melody of the
hardwood harmonium, in the sweet smell of all the white flowers of
the world I’ve dared not to pray with.

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