Dignity

“Imagine”, I say.
And I am lost, listening to my mind.
I hear the wind in the trees
from a different time
through palms, not pines:
when the mere rustle
was knowledge
and was comfort.

Family : families
extended and transitive
on the pyol
and under the starlight
discussing the new moon.
My mother,
– still the young girl
or so I imagine –
questioning and
conjecturing, respectfully
while wizened men
gaze upwards.
Do they question so too?

What did the other women speak?
Did they gaze upwards too,
in suit, and did they question —
or did they know the answers,
in their own ways?

That the skies portend what must be
That it must be our lot, to look up, and pray
in belief, not in defeat:
and function as beings
wielding token powers
for local change.

Sometimes, questions are killed
not by answers, but by old age.
Curiosity, we know, must die:
like all young things.
We hope she dies a clean death,
we pray she dies a young death.

I too, am growing old now.
My mother too, has grown older
— and she says, wiser.

To a young me,
growing old is shameful
and dying seems
the final epitaph
to who you have ended up becoming.

But if such is our fate
the least we can do,
is to die, with dignity.