Plummet

I was too young when it happened.
Or so it seemed.

They brought you home
with a crown of stitches on your forehead
and cotton choking your nostrils.

The room appeared to shrink around you,
as did those who loved you.
They said it was no place for a seven year old
so they took me away
speaking carefully in hushed tones, as if not to wake you.

Strangers with puffy eyes tried to feed me
and encouraged me to play carroms with the cousins.
Someone even got me comics.

Clearly, I had lost something,

I just wasn't being told what it was.

Then they carried you through the streets
but I was excused again,
you were too heavy for a seven year old's shoulders.

When my part finally came to be, the eldest son's calling,

I was obediently brave,

swallowing my childish fear of flames.

From the distant mountaintop of adulthood
every June
I look back on that seven year old boy in white.

That morning
he was asleep in a bed far away
as you lay dying.

Perhaps he still is.