My Illiterate Mother
By Fabiyas M V
A software to read and write is not installed
in my mom’s system.
We download pages of ignorance. Sometimes,
her monitor is blank.
Our neighbors wake up hearing the divine songs
from a rural temple,
when I jump up listening to the metal words
rattling in the kitchen.
She pours calumnies into the ear-buckets nearby
from her vast tank.
There are pores on her palms, and her liquid money
always leaks through.
My dad is often tossed on her tongue. Today
the sea is serene.
I hear the roar of some unnamed anxieties
from her white shell.
I grew up on her barren lap. My tap-root
went down so deep.
I resisted the droughts. Thanks, Mom. I owe you for
all my burning blooms.
Fabiyas M V is a writer from Orumanayur village in Kerala, India. He is the author of Kanoli Kaleidoscope, published by Punkswritepoemspress, USA; Eternal Fragments, published by erbacce-press, UK; and Moonlight And Solitude, published by Raspberry Books, India. His fiction and poetry have appeared in several anthologies, magazines and journals. His publishers include Western Australian University, British Council, Rosemont College, Forward Poetry, Off the Coast, Silver Blade, Pear Tree Press, Zimbell House Publishing LLC, Shooter, Nous, Structo, Encircle Publications, and Anima Poetry. He has won many international accolades, including, Merseyside at War Poetry Award from Liverpool University; Poetry Soup International Award, and Animal Poetry Prize 2012 from Royal Society for Prevention of Cruelties against Animals. He was the finalist for Global Poetry Prize 2015 by the United Poets Laureate Internationa. His poems have been broadcast on the All India Radio. He has an MA in English literature from University of Calicut, and a B Ed from Mahatma Gandhi University.
This poem was previous published in Westerly Magazine by Western Australian University.
Image credit: Asarum europaeum from a 16th-century edition of Pedanius Dioscorides’s work on herbal medicine, De Materia Medica, via PublicDomainReview.org.