About Your Funeral
For Nani
I
i think you know i did not cry.
the thing is, i think i did not know how to.
not as in how could this have happened and why did you go,
and all the other things the still-living tend to blurt out
as if they’ve just been woken from a dream and if it wasn’t for this
they’d still be sleeping.
i knew, more or less, exactly why you left us.
i’m fairly sure it was no fault of the government’s dialysis machine,
although it, too, was on its last legs.
it also had little to do with the pukegreen wallpaper that matched your green robe
and made you look like a bit like a frog in that LED-lit bed,
pinned down for a dissection called ‘your own good’.
it was also not due to a lack of faith
even though you could not remember a single god’s name
when we arrived at your side with beads, bhajans and holy flowers which,
to be honest, were plucked from the pot-plant in the waiting room.
i had whispered the gaytri mantra into them to make them suitable for you.
i know it’s not ideal, but mom said it would do.
the point here was that by this point you were staring at us politely
– just like you did whenever you watched the afrikaans evening news
(which i’m sure you understood but refused to speak).
you turned to mom to ask if swami and shiva were people you knew.
the nurse didn’t seem to find this forgetting of gods too serious, but between you and me,
i think she was more concerned about the bible being used as a jelly-stand.
II
not that your faith had conspired against you for its own convenience, of course.
not the way others had.
passed you around like an old tupperware that –
on principle – could never be thrown out, they did.
you were filled with marie biscuits and sugar-free wafers
and traded from house to house to an airtight complex for other unrecyclable containers.
there you might have remained,
had it not been for the slip on the stairs and the discovery
of a secret drawer filled with hulletts sugar packets.
you swore you only kept them for their quotes like that ghandi one,
never-mind the fact that sugar plantations were at the root of your curse.
never-mind that you couldn’t be the change you wanted to see in the world
when your body was in reverse.
a frog princess in a pukegreen ward.
i don’t think that was the change you were going for,
but your cells had other plans.
one by one they refused: from your skinny feet to your skinny hands.
soon your cells would desert you, leaving behind an empty box.
and maybe, i thought, this was the body’s way of making itself less of a burden.
for a body plump with memories and dreams must be difficult to burn.
III
so i did not cry.
i did not know how to,
when i knew why.
End
(2017)