Inheritance

After the curry-stained dishes had been cleared,
our dinner table became a stage—
the cosmic dance of Shiva,
Durga destroying the buffalo demon,
Rama vanquishing Ravana.

Father was a god who vanished
every evening only to reappear at breakfast
ready to finish those stories as if night
was only an intermission.

He never spoke about his bloodstained shoes,
his splattered white shirt,
never shared a heroic anecdote about those
he had saved or those he couldn’t,

his lessons to us often interrupted
by bleating pager or the telephone’s anxious ring.
We were mesmerized as he chanted the unfamiliar—
aneurysm, neoplasm, embolus,

words that I imagined could be something
beautiful until I encountered their translation
as I wandered the wards, an intern
half-asleep, feeling for the shallow
pulse.

After the Diagnosis

Stethoscope draped over white coat,
credentials nailed to eggshell walls,
babel borrowed from my tower of tomes,
flies from the beehive of my mouth,

swarms in the chilled air, my patients’ minds
dustbowls, future in and out of focus.
And suddenly the lives they are riding
come to a lurching halt, paralyzed in their tracks,

refuse to move forward or trace
their gallop back, a canyon looming ahead.
I sketch a bridge of hope,
plan their itinerary to places they would never

choose to go, give them directions
as if I have taken those routes myself
until their bodies abandon them,
moth-eaten, leave, voices silenced

receding into shadows.
After “cancer” they can hear nothing else.

Return to Water

My sister knew that the day after her passing
would be like a day after rain. How quickly earth
forgets water and promises,
calendar turned to December dressed in white,
naked dogwoods rustling between snowcapped
evergreens, and in the fog

of morphine she was a child again in the freeze,
refusing mother’s pleading to come inside
until her mittened fingers were wooden.
She said she wanted to be buried,
not burned, not the slow drip of melting wax,
bone and body humbled to ash.

She could not bear her chemo complexion, too dark like Shiva,
she said of moonless nights. Never ventured too far, afraid
of needles and poisons piped into her
to buy a few extra weeks, and she envisioned
sand dotted with shells, palm trees dancing,
ocean azure and intoxicating, a scene borrowed

from the travel magazine on her nightstand.
No longer would she gaze into the night sky
to pick out planets from the dust. Our parents cradled her
blue urn, adorned with a solitary dove, at the ocean’s edge
where it is always windy, scattering what they had created
into the restless brine where life began.

Sarath Reddy enjoys writing poetry which explores the world beneath the superficial layers of experience, searching for deeper meaning in his experiences as an Indian-American, as a physician, and as a father. Sarath is a gastroenterologist practicing in Braintree, Massachusetts. He lives with his wife and three children in Brookline, Massachusetts. Sarath’s poetry has been published in Journal of the American Medical Association and Off the Coast.

Fog on Water by Marilyn Hallet Granzyk