What I heard in the Street

Those who kill themselves rarely live to laugh the last laugh.
And the nations that promote killing babies in the womb go into extinction before long.
Absence of evidence ain’t no evidence for absence. Therefore, God is true.
Snowboarding is a pleasure while waterboarding is a torture.
Nothing can uproot Hamas from Palestine but the people of Palestine.
A tiger, though a powerful beast, is ill-equipped to kill a fly. So, Israelis should change their war tactics against Hamas.
And that scientists are the better-evolved philosophers.

A Stone for Mother

Absence, an absence of knowing, hangs
like a thick veil over her aged face.
Her memory – graying and fading fast.
Mother is losing her memory.
She knew she was losing memory.
It began as one or two incidents,
of confusion and misplaced mementos.
Mother said it was only natural.
It was only natural for someone, like her,
who has lived well beyond her prime,
like an ancient star burning its last out,
burns up the old memories,
burning all the bridges
to one’s childhood and words.
She lived her prime,
prime of her life in raising,
single-handedly,
all of me to all of heavens,
her only child
from a marriage
that was undone
By a vague sentence left
unwritten between two stanzas.
O woman,
from the plains
of a certain sun-baked continent,
I can’t let you cease to be my mother,
even though, I stopped existing
in your vanished memory.
O woman, who lives
in a reality diminished by forgetfulness,
even though,
you exist forever beyond my reach,
as some benevolent deity,
you are still my mother.
From mother to daughter,
From womb to womb and
to the womb of the Earth,
at the end of the long sentence,
an amorphous stone with no inscription.
But the sentence is not complete,
It will not complete
Until I too pull the veil of absence
over my face ,
turning into silence.

O merciful God, giver of harsh laws,
if You had wanted her to be stone
why as a woman was she born,
to be my mother?