Dharmavadana
Heart Unit Mum sleeps in the wardwhile Dad sits in a cornerhands clasped She speaks for minuteswithout making sensebut I hear love Down the phonemy sister’s screaming childrendrown out her voice The Last Parlour They could have botheredwith that half-dropped liplike a baffled smile.I guess it’s been hot. You look lostin your jacket and tank top,pressed grey slackslike a child dressed up in adult clothes.Your skin is smoothand rouged, notthe brown it was when you were first dead.This is not you, Dad.It’s not even flesh.It’s some canvas, finished with, left in a box,a creation of Pygmalion’she got bored with.I put a rose between your hands, your Bible on your chest.Whatever tensed the strings, lit the eyes,exhaled a voice has goneand this is like a bad reproduction,a skewed sketch, all wrong.The vase of white lilieson the sill has more of you than this show.And the summer light through the window. Old Lady in a Cemetery She rises in the shadeof fan palmsin a bed of busy lizziesby the stone-arched gates, arms lifted at her sideslike a pelican unfolding on a rock.Her mouth rolls and twitches:a yawn, an airing of the jaws, a clapping of the mandiblesas she sniffs the morning air.She creaks half upright, squats again,head turning, mouth agape, as if she’s landed by mistake.Faded cherry cardigan (once a mother knitted that), a lime green dressthat hugs her knees, hair a spill of curls beneatha battered pink straw hat. She takes inthe walls, the gates,the drive in front of her that leads one way to the mausoleums,the other to the road outside. Her eyesare wild –a little girl’s, a child’s. Dharmavadana is poetry editor of the Buddhist arts magazine Urthona (http://www.urthona.com/). His own poetry has appeared in the magazines Magma, Smith’s Knoll, Presence and in the anthology The Heart as Origami: Contemporary Buddhist Poets (Rising Fire Press 2005), as well as previously in Buddhist Poetry Review (issue # 3). He lives in London.