Dedicated to organ donation day today.
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A Soul Never Dies
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Her eclipsed face devoid of emotions
near his bedside staring into blank
going through the motions.
His fixed eye staring back
with heavily bandaged head
declared brain dead.
Nurses glancing expectantly
watching her trembling hands
signing on dotted lines
she nods in approval
a tear drop rolls down
watching poignantly
all life support removal.
Not a good sight for a mother to see
yet she wished to felicitate
the flight of a soul to be
till caged in the body
for another birth
a myth. she believed.
Tears refusing to stream, clenching her
fists
pulling her own body, a physical wreck
holding her emotions in check
lest her courage gives away
watches his body carted away .
Clinical strategy taking over physical ethos
She reconciled soon with the loss
but could never take off the albatross.*
.
One afternoon,
strange but smiling faces
descended like angles from heaven
at her door with the Dean
young and not too young,
all were terminal cases
but lived to see the day
through harvesting his son’s
different tissues and organs.
She believed in the myth
A SOUL NEVER DIES.
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All rights reservedTribhawan Kaul
Note from the poet :-*This phrase refers to
lines from the poem The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge,
in which the eponymous mariner, who shoots an albatross, is obliged to carry
the burden of the bird hung around his neck as a punishment for and reminder of
his ill deed.
