[image from eons.com]
She is ninety,
slim and bent
with arthritis,
moving slowly,
and with pain.
She can barely walk,
and her hands are
gnarled claws,
bent and curled
and stiffened,
yet, morning, noon
and night,
when she
whisks the chapatis
together,
her hands move
as swiftly as a girl's,
practiced with the
thousands
of chapatis
she has made
for her husband
all the years
of their lives.
Today,
they both were ill,
huddled under blankets,
yet when he called her,
she hobbled over,
tending him
as tenderly
as if he were
a babe.
When she grew tired,
she sat up in bed,
with an expression on her face
that made me think
of the three year old
she once was,
sleepy and grumpy,
yet unwilling to lay down
and miss
the grownup party
going on
in the other room.
Her long silver
pony tail,
her slim figure,
her oval face,
told me
she was
beautiful,
once,
a young girl
laughing and flinging
her hair
over her shoulder,
eyes alight and mischievous,
enticing her young husband,
her step a light dance
on the earth.
Now,
inch by painful inch,
bent over her walker,
she creeps down the hall
and gifts me with chapatis,
because she knows
I love them.
She is still
beautiful,
so beautiful,
just in
another way.
