A Year without Her: Lotus Birth Nurtured upon a Utopian Figment

















I’ve been remaking Pietà the other way around:
mother was dead, 
the son who wanted to carry her in his arms – segregated,
their skins looked the same.

Having this every day dream started as a ritual.
Then became an ordeal.

Once there was no ache under her breast bone. To end the dormancy, mammary glands had been prepared for the last lassie stiffness.
And then love,
once transformed into stones and buried anonymously in ancient Gobekli  Tepe
where sky burial wasn’t deep enough, reincarnated within her.
Blood she lost in labour and blood she turned to breast milk
gave him a semblance of altruism 
on that day we met at first.

He fathered my sons. Their scars were made when the navel-string was snipped.
Days later, the stump fell off;
shrunken and black.
Scars are neither their center of gravity
nor the new skin filling it.

I shed my skin the day she left.
Closed pores on it
deny the breathing.   


2015 

© Subhadra Jayasundara