A Soul Never Dies

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.