Volume 5 | Issue 4 | Oct - November
2011 |
I Was There
Lalita Noronha
(for my mother)
She had never looked more beautiful
than on her wedding day,
I know,
I was there
in the dew of her rose bouquet.
The night I was born,
she wore purple on her skin,
a red slit below her naval,
black moons beneath her eyes.
Angels came to claim her,
I know,
I was there
holding her down,
tethering her to earth with my umbilical cord.
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
