Intergenerational Trauma

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My grandmother pitches a tent in my mindscape

a white Teepee, wavy in the haze of time.

Its skin gently flutters in the howling wind,

the stakes inch deeper by the decades,

poking the tectonic plates.

 

The cone is also volcanic, becoming mount Fuji.

Solitary, distant and snow-capped,

with the hot unknown flowing beneath.

When the immovable rumbles

it is cinder, ash and lava.

 

In the months of disappearance,

Grandma runs away, rolling up her tent.

She is the white moon in the sky.

Pale, distant and curled up tight,

hovering over the edge.

 

She ebbs and flows my oceanic mother,

pulling and pushing her

with waxing and waning abandonment.

My mother breathes tempest against the cold moon

crashing her heart against the rocks of the coast.

 

I am the ambivalent creature

that bathes in the cosmic moonlight.

I swim from the sky to the ocean shores and back.

I am of the sky and the water with no firm ground.

I thought I am the oyster that holds a precious pearl

till my daughter nudged me out of the sand.

She sees a shell holding the light of yester eons.

She raises me to her ears

and clearly hears the roars of an untameable sea.

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By Priya Rajan

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Priya Rajan lives in Bangalore. She is an ex-IT professional, a play therapist and a striving writer. She writes creative non-fiction and poetry, which have been published in Orion, Flocklit, Hinterland, snapdragon, iO literary journal, Gyroscope review and such. She is interested in working with children and words.