Elegy for the Gold Aunt

Later she began to hear the stars:

                                   split-dark-second of absence,

                                 reverse spark.

Between echoes of culture

molecules grind,

particular,

oscillating.

The memoir of silence.

Someone’s dance consists

                           of slowly walking

                                              offstage.

She went raging, not gently; raging, into the Mother’s arms:

O fierce one, with such tenderness in you.

Take my relation with her unbuttery skin of snake.

Take my relation with her hairfall & diabetic eye.

Take my relation with no sugar in her blood.

Take my relation with her weak, bitter heart.

Take my relation with her tongue restless as fire.

Take my relation with her legacy of shame.

Take my relation with her walking-stick & looking-glass.

Take my relation with exile’s ice in her spleen.

Take my relation with her brittle teeth, mouthfuls of rage.

Take my relation with her miniature devotions.

Take my relation to the unrestricted realm,

               she who chafed at her bonds

                               & felt them grow tighter, tighter.

Take my relation with the fight in her liver.

Take my relation who persists in me.

~ Minal Hajratwala

 

Minal Hajratwala is a writing coach, author of the award-winning ‘Leaving India: My Family’s Journey From Five Villages to Five Continents’ (2009), and editor of ‘Out! Stories From the New Queer India’ (2013). Her first book of poems, ‘Bountiful Instructions for Enlightenment’, is forthcoming from The (Great) Indian Poetry Collective, of which she is a founding member.