Brother, Amma Is Well Poem by Shyam Chakraborty

Brother, *Amma is well, though
Still she breaths with handful dreams
The elegant days in happy swing
The aeons fled in twisting magnitude
When the sun smiled with eternal pretence
The jovial bliss that laced the heart of
Each other and toddler mind that
Embodied our spirit – yearned for mere
Playthings and candies that broadened the lips
To put a smile.
She can recall the talks, those conversations
Of childish queries and the size and length
Needed to knit the woolen attires…
Her wardrobe still replete with those
Worn-out cloths, with the fragrance concealed
Perpetually where sometimes she smell the lost days…
That seems to be nostalgic with some trace of resent
Inflicted by time, the torments of remorseless ages.
Now as you know we changed a lot,
Much shifted from the hymn we uttered once
In tone, in blissful chorus, and now it is
Autumn time; the season to act in haste for winter
Ahead; the pickles ready to be exposed in the sun
Where they can dry in perfection and a scarecrow
To scare crows as they often encroach Granma’s territory…
Not that she lives in nothingness, holding relic of
Exhilarated past—
But, still she knits with her frail hands…but those
Length and size are now different and her
Wardrobe sustains, being replete with vain outfits
And her dreams breathing under crumbs of pills,
Medicines, capsules as daily doses…and I, a man with
Humble dream, who dotes on her craftsmanship
To bind the kith and kin in single melodic
String, faraway from the chasms of spurious relations…

And I, say in stern solitude, still, while crossing her
Hasty waves, of grey-haired latent disgruntled thoughts…
‘Brother, Amma is well’….

*Amma— Grandmother of the poet.