TENDING HIS MOTHER’S GARDEN
my father wakes up each day to
carry his grief like an urn
Years after his mother’s demise,
my father wakes up each day to
carry his grief like an urn across
the streets of this country. Some days
he wanders the room, his eyes fixed on
the cracked walls that house his mother’s
photographs. What do we know about
losing our loved ones to death?
In mourning, my father remembers
his mother’s pale body as she neared
death, as her eyes became clouded
by the sorrow of dying, by the reality
of watching how her bones weakened,
her life reduced to something too fragile
to be touched. Some days the
the dead emerge through the windows
of our rooms where we stand, weary
of the world and its deluge of sadness,
the world and the rubble of fallen dreams.
In mourning the dead, my father
watches through the windows
of his room to see if, among the
people walking past, there will be
someone who resembles his mother,
someone who prays for him to find
solace as he retires to bed tonight,
another day gone in the absence
of his mother.
Rasaq Malik’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Prairie Schooner, Crab Orchard Review, Rattle, New Orleans Review, Spillway, Poet Lore, Michigan Quaterly Review, One, Minnesota Review, and elsewhere. He won Honorable Mention in 2015 Best of the Net for his poem Elegy, published in One. In 2017, Rattle and Poet Lore nominated his poems for the Pushcart Prize. He was shortlisted for Brunel International African Poetry Prize in 2017. He was a finalist for Sillerman First Book for African Poets in 2018.
