ManicDDaily

After Working A Very Short Time At Mother Teresa’s Home For The Dying, Kalighat (Kolkata)

We carried some
like laundry
to small sheet-metal
tubs, their scooped torsos
hammocked
in our grip.

There was one
who made me wish I’d stuck
with washing pots and pans in the back,
where cold jolts of spigot, along with
the straw and sand we used
to get at the burned spots,
had steadied my hands.

Because it seemed that she
might die in my arms; worse,
cough–

Her thinned limbs spindled–
stripped kindling–only her
head, which the shaved bristle
somehow oversized,
seemed substantial and the dark
gaze that clutched
as if I might drop her–

Then I did drop her–
not
as I carried,
not
as I set her down
(awkwardly arranging the
double sheen of shin), but,
after I left that blue
moist hall, Calcutta, and for years afterwards,
when I reached
for the story I had pocketed,
and, too busy, too fearful, too
padded, washed my hands
once more.

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Click here for a somewhat ponderous reading.  (I’m sorry, still learning; it does give a sense of pauses.) After Working A Very Short Time At Mother Teresa’s Home For the Dying

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Above is a draft poem posted for dVerse Poets Pub Open Link Night that I still don’t think I’ve gotten right (in multiple ways.)  It’s not meant to denigrate hand-washing!  But is based on a very short experience working at Mother Teresa’s Home for the Dying in the 1980’s in what was then Calcutta (now known as Kolkata).  I was lucky enough to see Mother Teresa a couple of times.  She was tremendously impressive, immensely charismatic.  And her nuns (the Missionaries of Charity) seemed to me like angels.  Most of the dying in Kalighat had tuberculosis. 

\Check out dVerse for great online poetry.