Volume 5 | Issue 4 | Oct - November
2011 |
Eulogy To My Mother
Lalita Noronha
You tethered us with silken threads,
wove our lives into a tapestry,
a mosaic of memories
you wrapped around continents,
the girth of the earth,
as if time and distance were irrelevant.
Take us back to the beginning.
Give us faith in sheets of monsoon rain,
between claps of thunder,
under doubts that fill ponds and swell rivers.
Give us peace in gentle rain
between folds of petals,
under blades of grass.
May we always hear you calling,
clear above the sparrow’s breathing
and our heart’s plaintive longing.
Lalita Noronha - Born in India, Lalita Noronha has a Ph.D. in Microbiology and is a widely published scientist, poet, writer and teacher. Her literary work has appeared in over eighty journals, magazines and anthologies, including The Baltimore Sun, The Christian Science Monitor, Catholic Digest, Gargoyle, and Get Well Wishes (Harper Collins.) She has twice won the Maryland Literary Short Story Award, a Maryland Individual Artist Award, and the National League of American Pen Women Award, among others. She is a fiction editor for the Baltimore Review and teaches both science and a humanities course (Glimpses of the Culture of India) based on her short story collection, Where Monsoons Cry. Her poem "Bar Talk" was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2011. Often featured on National Public Radio, “The Signal,” she is working on her first novel.
e-mail: drlnb@comcast.net
Web: http://www.lalitanoronha.com
