Everything is in place;
Your books sit prettily on their shelves; neat cupboards return my vacuous stare.
The bed is without crease or a dent, and the warm smell of your sleeping head.

I sit with an empty chair for my dinner,
Reliving lost time, remembering missing flavours—
Celebrations, confrontations and teenage aberrations,
Recalling your small joys and fears, while tasting the salt of my own tears.

Silence hangs onto every lifeless room,
Even as I hear echoes of your childhood dance in its corners.
I exist on the intersection of two thresholds,
Reconciling with yesterdays to drown today's aching certitude

Everything is in place except me,
And I am left—ridiculous,
Not knowing what to do with myself.

 

This is a Finalist of Cha's "Reconciliation" Poetry Contest. Jyotsna Jha on "Everything Is In Place Except Me": The poem revolves around the themes of remembering; separation and departure, and filling up of the spaces left behind. It is about a child's redrafting of his love for his parents as he; a young man now, prepares himself for the world. It is about a mother's reconciliation with the fact that the axis of her life has shifted somewhat, leaving her struggling with the empty hours, drifting between past and present in a house sanitized of the clamour and jangle of the home she has always known. [Read Jason Lee's commentary on "Everything Is In Place Except Me"] [Back to "Reconciliation"]