By Saniya H
Living is slow work, nurtured between heartbeats
Like light birthed in the core of our star scattering,
dying, germinating again for millennia before
nestling in my grandmother’s garden, and sprouting
another leaf. Slow work, a thousand years and more,
veiled in the succulent pulp of mangos
caught in her great grandchildren’s teeth.
There are histories etched in the lines around her eyes,
being etched on my mother’s hands, and I am dazed
by the decades that diffuse into every roti she shapes
into a perfect circle. Like star clusters my ancestors found
God through, the ones I trace into English constellations,
dead in some distant time, dead right now, their fate
held hostage to centuries.
Some days I eat only because my mother
asks, and her tender question unspools decades
of uneasy futility I nurture under my tongue, revives
the part of me that accompanied her in her girlhood, reminds
that every apple she ate nourished me, even before I
was. Like her mother before her, and her’s before her still, each of us
wreathed all the way back to Eve
Mankind was created in haste, my scripture says,
but understand, living,
Living is composed of forevers and a day.