Wasted Youthful Years! Poem by Veeraiyah Subbulakshmi

When I was your waist high,
I saw you looking at the sky,
Told me that your love would fly,
To come back to make you shy,
Behind the door, where you would hide,
From the eyes of roving lads of village,
A woman displaced from the loved ones,
Planted in the land of forefather's hostile ground,
How many days I witnessed your hope,
While you reared the brood that your love gave,
I never saw you cried for your lonely status,
While the guys, who kept the end of the noose,
Some few thousand miles away, struggled,
To send the papers of money to feed and prosper,
Wives of emigrant workers and bosses,
May forget the needs of nature's nagging,
Taking only seven days in a week fasting,
Though a few have gone mentally disturbed,
Though a weak few have been tricked and spoiled,
The rest stand as the pillars to shoulder the culture,
all alone but in crowd, on the land of their children's father.