2020 - The Terror

My mother's face, while she slept,

contorted as a taxidermy mounted

aloft. The milky wisp of a trance, 

quietly humming at the bay of her 

eyelids, patiently clasped together—

asking her to sleep, calmly; like the

pacific. But when she woke up, she 

grasped my fingers, one at a time,

"next year", she sighed, her body 

trembling, "we will be free; free of

this murder. .this slow death of 

people", and I kept shushed.

The year is nearing an end, slowly

tip-toeing towards the hem of a 

new parenthesis where, while we

shall not have any idea, a new life 

might be born & an old might decease.

"This pandemic; it finally ended, maa."

my cheeks will be scarlet, soaking 

incessant violence & tidy tears.

There is a family of people, ambling

away, their eyes impaled with fear,

"my family, they died, they...", their eyes

will grow sober, "couldn't survive Corona."

& the economy, like a torrent of 

butterflies, will flit away—float on a 

crisis shrouded with misfortune. 

While that family will shriek, there'll be

a silence nudging at the threshold of

a house, the reinforced concrete walls

stippled with chinoiserie & a multitude 

of angst reverberating around like napalm

thunking at the brink of their wealthy

household. I heard them, their rich-clad

family was wailing, so softly that nobody 

listened. "My wife", a husband will sigh, 

his white lapels altered into a grayish 

cast, congested with doldrums of tears,

"is in there, in the ICU", his pupil will envelope

a skulking lament seen decades before. 

But she'll be alive, do not worry, hush.

The migrants, with their feet blistering

into an abysmal sore, will glance at you.

Their eyes hungry with a desolate urge to

sleep like before, like the times when

"two meals a day" was scurrying at the

nucleus of their exhausted cells.

"Is this the end?", he will cry, his family—

losing hopes, summoning a requiem;

will recline on the dunes of wild grasses,

"Is this how we will end?"

hush-hush-hush, it will pass. The economy 

will tame; & you?

Your heartbeats, like a cardiac arrest, will 

cease at the lip of this pervasive disease,

yet, with a bolt, will lie wide-awake, because,

"This is not the end, 2020, it will not be the end after all."