Maybe, a little kindness
I have often been cruel. Knowingly, unconsciously. With people closest to me, and invariably because I take them for granted. So it is a mini tragedy, when I sit down and have a conversation - and I’m short, I’m angry, I’m sarcastic.
Take my mum - she is frail now, though her voice still has passion, but is veering towards gentle tones now. And I can ‘win’ any battle by the sheer dint of volume. Pyrrhic victory, if there ever was one, as she goes silent, and I keep reading the newspaper as if nothing has happened.
We are both in a space of a confined relationship, whose contours could never be changed. I would be her son forever - and we were tied to each other inextricably, as fact, as benediction, as affliction. Our relationship is one of perfect imperfection. We come with legacy in our blood and history in our senses, as we fill each other’s space on a daily - often hourly - basis. And within that proximity lies the very seed of slowly getting blinded to the good we do to each other. We start taking each other for granted.
And I mull on Oscar Wilde’s symbolical lines - “Yet each man kills the thing he loves, By each let this be heard…” The realisation is a sickening thud. Because to hurt a loved one is to do the irreconcilable. Circumstances might determine a future of forced togetherness , but the heart remembers what it remembers.
And scars take longer than forgiveness to lose their mark.
The Poem:
I sit with my mum, impatient, seeing her struggle
to remember a name I deliberately hold back.
Why? I don’t know.
And then I get impatient with her
and she feels sorry for herself.
.
She is downcast,
for a while, as she mulls,
and softly says
“You will reach my age too, son.”
.
And I know, as one knows oneself,
that all that matters
in this strange world of old age,
is someone to be
simply kind.
If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on the preciousness of gentleness and kindness -