In Memory of mothers battered, bruised and betrayed

The ocean is salty from the tears they have shed

the four winds of corruption separate them:

greed, hatred, corruption, deception

Unique is their pain

but equal is their love

for each other

for the Mother Earth from whence they came

for their children who continue to sin against them

and each other.

So exhausted from centuries of loss

Neither sister has the strength to swim.

Mother India has no arms to hold her children

Her children just fight

And starve

nothing pains a mother more than knowing

that no matter how much she gives

she cannot feed all her children

She has shed tears

a monsoon of tears

and still her children thirst

most for water

some for gold.

She has spilled blood

Rivers of blood that once carried the bodies of stolen lives.

The current is still driven by her anguished screams.

her bloodshed

her tears

persist today

And in her loneliness

She aches for her sisters

ravaged by the same pains

segregated and separated.

And she remembers…

…beloved Bangladesh,

She is still cleaved from neck to thigh.

Once her children were silenced

now cannot cease these accusations

The heartbreaking corruption fills her house

the only truth is,

that there is none

No better than a courtesan

She relies on the princes of this so called “developed world”

She sings them her sad songs

and they anoint her body with the sickened oil of corruption

Beauty though she is,

her body is funded by their pity

and her hair is groomed by their greed.

And though her golden bangles are rusted,

she has some lingering hope…

Sister Pakistan clings to the crescent moon

The only jewels she has left

is the single star left in the sky

The Mosque is red from the rivers of blood she sheds daily

when her daughters are raped

and her sons are slaughtered

in the name of those foreign gods she does not know.

She has been raped by militancy

over and over again

Foreigners have cut holes in her body and filled it with gun powder and nuclear radiation

dare she embrace her children?

All promises made to her were lies

Her children,

love her in principle

but not practice

There is no room for love when there is money to be made

And even in her moment of terror, she thinks of her sisters…

…Mother Sri Lanka deteriorates in a Cancer ward

There is no treatment for this

Metastatic cancers rampant in her frail body.

She bleeds

She cries

She is kidnapped by Poverty

hands tied,

floating on that lotus petal

far from the mainland

She hears the cries of her sisters

distant echoes she may be imagining

She cannot move toward them

so she cries more

and the red tide flows.

The gunshots within her are incapacitating

blow after blow

her heart breaks

her body weakens

Her estranged children fight oceans away

where they cannot see her state.

…and still she breathes on.

Immobilized,

Four sisters lie alone, listlessly.

Even if it happens in another life,

do their children intend to reunite their mothers

in their time of great pain?

Or is the world so deaf

Does money speak louder than the agony

of separated sisters?

In times like these,

Mothers who have sisters,

need each other more than they need anyone else.

Author:Jacquelin Chatterpaul