In response to The Daily Post’s Daily Prompt: Disaster
No Words for This
©April 17th, 2016
By Vijaya Sundaram
When the train pulled
Black and hateful and loud –
Loud as all of India –
Into that teeming station,
With thousands pushing,
Pummeling, yelling, crowding,
Cursing, shouting, shoving,
Grunting, hitting, rushing,
Punching, running, stumbling
Into that still moving train,
As it pulled into the platform,
And you slipped and fell,
And your leg was trapped
Between the train and the
Unrelenting platform, between
Hateful concrete, steel and stone,
You couldn’t cry out –
The pain was too large
For sound, too sudden
For speech, too cruel
For expression.
When you lay bleeding on the platform –
You leg hanging by a thread,
You were far from home,
And someone, a kind soul,
Took sense from your panting voice
Your fading consciousness,
And called home, four hours away,
To tell your wife, –
It was a cataclysm.
Railway porters, quick as fire,
Bore you away on a stretcher,
Tenderly like a mother with new babe,
Impelled by love and distress,
To the nearby hospital
And saved your life.
And when the news of all this
Came floating on the tide to me,
I lost my footing, slipped to the floor.
A little empty space
Opened up inside my stomach,
As if a universe had been carved away
And only dark matter remained.
And we thought you might die,
But you didn’t.
Laughing with deep sadness,
Making terrible puns,
Jokes in the worst taste,
You recovered, and ate well.
And we sighed, and prepared
To help you face a life
With one leg.
And my mother nurtured you
And kept you close, and
Tended to you, setting aside sadness –
Love in her every move.
And you lived on
For fifteen more years,
Even as cancer grew in you
From blood transfusions
Gone hideously awry.
It’s not fair! I yelled to the skies,
Not fair!
You died after cruel pain
Crucified your body,
And my mother faced
Life alone, mute and stoic,
Aching and struck silent
By unending sorrow.
There are no words
For this.
Disaster?
I spit in its face.
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