Maadar

All I can remember from her
are her sunken eyes, her wispy, wrinkled skin,
somehow miraculously youthful, beautifully protruding cheek bones,
arthritis ridden joints and a constant prayer on her lips.

What I don't remember
is her unbelievable solitude
her unfathomable struggle.

I remember her bitterness... her hurt...

Her youngest went to war
Her oldest stayed and became a stone
Her sons like fragile pillars of dust
Her faith like unwavering flame weaving her unspeakable truth 

Do I have her cheek bones?
Her sunken eyes?

Do I know what she dreamed of?

I know she was stubborn...
How did she hold her own and speak her truth
in the deafening sound of a world unprepared to hear her revolt?

She died... alone...I didn't go to the funeral.

She was no one of mine.

As I get older I learn of the flaws of all the saints
As I get older my eyes sink in and my joints hurt

As I get older I think there better be a god
too many people I know were wasted away
faithful in his redemption and avenging prowess.

I look in the mirror to the image of a woman that I am
a 40 patch piece of all the women I don't know.

They were more than a grave and a lock of hair
more than memory of a child forced to learn the meaning of motherhood
by her own fleeting childhood.

I haven't earned a single piece of my being.
Just a lucky patchwork of good parts of all the unlucky women
who left no mark except a vague name that will barely last the next generation.

I can hardly remember their names now
And to pass them along to an offspring who may in turn remember their names for 50 years…

Like I will be but a handful of dust
for a child 75 years from now
when he will pick me up in an urn and throw me to the wind
and I will be dispersed through the thickness of time.

She had a way of not loving me
so much so, that I made a point of not loving her

until tonight
when I remembered her little pot, on that little stove, in that little kitchen
and it squeezed my heart into a tiny wrinkled ball
of youth and ignorance and not giving a damn.

I would never want to stay over at hers
and she would never really ask me to
but she’d wash a plate full of fruits for me
and I didn't think they were clean enough
and I wouldn't sit next to her when she would ask me to
and she wouldn’t tell me stories when I asked her to.

She once told me of the rosary beads made from date pits
made by a prisoner of war, who had something to fight for…
and I envied that, even though I didn’t understand it…and I still do.

I wasn’t old enough to care to ask who she was.

The news announcer would be barking in the large belly of an old TV
where the wooden little door was pushed to the sides
and I liked to play with the little house for the barking man
and I hated, hated, hated the florescent lights and the hard pillows
but loved the hand fan she always used and the kettle on the fire in the “bukhari” she would keep going all winter…

and she had a system god dammit! She had a system…

She cared about my father so much
that she hated us for having him in our lives
and she thought my mother caused the cells to grow into a tumor
and the morphine to not work.

She was a woman from a village of women-made-invisible
but she shed that skin
and I never will know what she did all those days
in that little place where the stairs lead to no place of love
and the plants and the rosary beads were a family that god wanted her to have.

…

You know what?
Fuck this story.
Fuck all the stories of all the women who had no voice
and no choice
and no say
and I don't remember a single valuable thought from them. 

They all lived like they never were
and I will forever remember how they are dead
and I don't care about them.

Their death has meant to me much more than I ever cared to care about their lives.

They were like little statues of marble in a memorial made of straws.
But now they are all strewn through the wind for me to forever sigh about
and about their enigmatic, effervescent realities
and they may never have loved me.

They never cared about me.

They never knew me.

They would never have liked me.

After all I lived a life they won’t approve…

They shaped nothing of me.

Yet my cheeks,
and my sunken eyes,
tell me I have a part of them I can't shed.