This is an attempt to experience the pain of another. But the theme of this poem is the lies that people tell us to make money for themselves.
LIAR LIAR
She has not eaten in days
Her body is weak, her mind tense
Heart beat feeble.
But that means nothing to him.
He puts the tube in her mouth –
A first in seventy five years.
He watches the footage of her insides.
Its Cancer in her food pipe.
It has spread.
It may be lethal.
She bends her aged back further
As her daughters translate his lies into vernacular.
The tears that well up in her eyes
Do not flow
Maybe because she thinks its time;
Maybe because her body doesn’t have the strength to cry.
He puts her on the hospital bed
And puts a drip to her arm.
As her body is revitalized,
Her mind spirals into an uncontrollable storm of reverie.
She was a child, not more than nine
As she buried her doll in the fields as sacrifice to the rain gods
To give them rain.
She was the eldest daughter.
She married first.
Her five children.
Her nurtured sons.
Her nurturing daughters.
Their children.
Wet beds.
Tea for her husband
Evening drinks and dinner.
The next few days are a blur.
She hasn’t tasted food in a long time.
The taste of the last vomit still lingers in her mouth.
He comes in
Takes off the drip.
Her daughters take her somewhere.
They put the tube in her mouth again.
She wishes they would stop the torture;
The pain in her body is endless.
Sometimes she wishes it would end;
That the burden of life
The burden of her children has weighed her down too much.
She wants to run around the fields like she did when she was nine.
She thinks of dying in a bed, of cancer
And sleeps – half dreaming, half awake.
They tell her now the cancer hasn’t spread
That she will be fine with radiotherapy.
She is tired,
Underprepared and lost.
She was almost prepared to die.
Maybe she is now too.
What was his name?
Liar Liar.
He almost put her through chemo
Just to pocket the Gandhis.
She forgave him.
But we could not forgive the bastard.
He poisoned her mind
With thoughts of death.
-Sirtaj Kaur
