A Woman's Ordeal

for Abet

He came to me
As a black cloud, dry and heavy
Without precipitation
His eyes, an unflowing stream,
Brooding all the hurts and confusions of his life.
His heart, a stagnant lake:
Breeding ground of hate and anger,
And a reprobate mind—
He can’t think straight.

They took his mother
To a mental health clinic in the nearby city
Last week. His mother is in delirium—
She was a bottle of alcohol,
Preserver of hate,
Hers was a face of smiling
Pretense—of placid gentleness, as of the quiet noon
But her heart was boiling like Mayon
a year before a major eruption
Her countenance, her eyes are cold as the torrent
Of rain in June.

When they returned, she speaks not much different
than the way she used to after her husband
beat her. She bled inside…

After the beating, he’d declare his love for her
In the quietness of the evening
So they can go to bed together.
And he held her lovingly with the same
Hands that beat her.

And she would whisper
“Your love is sweet…
Your love is sweet…
(as the brackish sea)”
With her voice, indiscernible
Even by her own heart and her own mind.

She could feel him her between her legs
She could hear him let out a harsh sigh
of relief. She could taste his sweat
mingling with her tears. But she could feel him
nowhere in her heart.

She was a placid lake.
She was a bottle.
She was a dormant volcano
Seething within.

One night in the silence of her child, the bottle was broken
She was shattered. A home has been torn
Apart.
The heavy black clouds gathered
And yet the rain didn’t fall
The rain didn’t fall.

She became a stagnant stream,
Like a boat, her mind floats in the nothingness.
Forever wondering and wandering while
The waters whisper their rippling melody, but
She started living in her distant memory
She lives to blabber and talk albeit unsensibly.

Nobody understood

Her husband never tried
To understand her, to care for her
As he ought to.

Nobody understands

Though she talks and she talks nobody takes her
Seriously, but her son
Who sits here with me, telling her story.

He fixes his shirt hastily, hesitantly
Afraid to let his tears drop.

He simply looks away.