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
