Shakira

a poem about my great grand mother

Sometimes it is not easy
to think she is there sitting by the windowsill.
She lost her pace in time.
As words come out they dissappear in mid-air.
Her childhood, and walks on the green fields of Bosnia
before war, before the bloodshed.
They fled, she used to tell,
and that she was the one to jostle
the girl sitting behind
who usually failed to solve the math problems
the Serbian teacher used to ask.
She was a little girl then,
full of hopes and an acute mind.
"Shakira don't give clues to your friends!"

Now far from home
though children and grandchildren she had
in a known but not motherland,
she lost connection
either by old age
or by the waiting
to hold him-her early loss- once again.
She is angry to the nurses who tends her.
She forgets.
Yet, she remembers beauty,
she still knows good and bad.
The most important things of her life
her children, grandchildren are erased.
They are not strangers but,
known figures from a past she is doomed to forget.

copyrighted to Meva Onyurt(Akgiray)