Volume 6 | Issue 3 | Oct-November
2012 |
Secrets
Lalita Noronha
My sister breaks roti to mop left-over gravy
from her son's plate, chews,
stops only when the stainless steel thali shines.
This is how she lived, she tells her boy. Your grandmother
wasted not one bite,
taking from the earth only what she needed.
What would my mother say if she could see her youngest daughter
teach what she had taught us?
And if she knew we knew what she didn't tell us-
those smoky shadow veils,
how she pressed her salty lips to keep her tears
from seeping down her cheeks and chin.
Each night I ask her again,
tell me, tell me what you now know,
what you didn’t know then.
Tell me the secret of how you let life
wash over you, without washing you away.
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
