Guest Poet 19 - Ananya S Guha - Grandmother And Her two Son

(This what I am guessing is the last guest poet is late through been very busy is by Ananya S Guha, a poet from India who I met many years through a website called Heart to Heart which featured some of both of our poems)

I have taken this weight off,

the proverbial burden of responsibility

or irresponsibility, we call it whatever we will.

Once upon a time I sat on grandmother's lap

to listen to stories of ghosts, catcalls and her two sons

climbing up the wind, soaring skies after dying of  poisonous

fumes of the stomach. The narrative, unreal, surreal blended

into my apostasy, my image of myth maker, teller of fables and lies!

The weight suddenly lessened, slowly in life, when I realized

that truths told were untold ( lies!)

Grandmother, her fabulous world were lies, until she died

at a ripe old age of hundred and two. I looked at her frail self,

and wondered how this frailty could cause a string of lies!

Fabulous, untold stories, of her two sons, flying across

when space crafts did not exist. Now I know.

I know, unexplored terrains, I know grandmother as a psychic

teller of tales. Fantasy.

I know, she is still climbing across untenanted skies.

Grandmother's ghost is real. The house in Guwahati

shackled with ominous ruins is as true, or false as

Grandmother's tales. Her rickety fingers still point

at me. Her narratives give me a lull, and then

sleepless nights. Her two sons, dying of cholera

are my dying assets. I still live. Grandmother, her two sons...

They were twins.

(Ananya S Guha lives in Shillong in NE India. His poems in English have been published in both print and online journals in India and abroad. He holds a doctoral degree on the novels of William Golding. He works in the Indira Gandhi National Open University)