I lost her name somewhere
from where I can’t get there.
Her name I have lost
but not memories of her.
Can you tell me her name?
I met her in a rusty dusty bus on the
highway from somewhere to nowhere.
We had sat silent and sulky quite unknowingly
and then at a roadside cafe we spoke.
Later as evening fell she told me a story...
She told me her teen twins died
on their birthday in a car crash
all she had hugged was a handful of ash.
A long grief filled year passed before
she let her mate know
she was afraid he too would die
all alone in a foreign land.
Do you think that's why I lost her name
never ever to find it again?
I remember her story but can’t remember her name
Each winter I hug the maroon velvet abaya
she brought for me from faraway Libya.
You see she remembered my name
and had found me.
Somewhere else away from
bleeding memories she felt free
she said she was happy there
she helped women give birth in her care
sometimes when they were twins
she blessed them from her heart.
If you remember her name
tell me even if the night is dark and
the moon has hidden its face.
Some nights sleep eludes me
“You “she had said holding
my hand to her heart
“are my only friend.”
I don’t remember her name .
Only that dusty rusty mysterious bus which
goes from somewhere to nowhere.
Did she make me forget her name?
Bio
Dr. Roopali Sircar Gaur, PhD. bilingual poet-performer, writer, environmentalist, and social justice activist. Roopali taught English at Delhi University in India. She has written for peer-reviewed journals, and served on academic conference panels worldwide. Roopali’s poems have been translated into Hindi, Bangla and Telugu, Her poems are housed at Stanford University’s Digital Humanities initiative, Life in Quarantine: Witnessing Global Pandemic, and in the University of Bath’s Transnational project. She is the Consulting Editor for Different Truths, an online global participatory journal, and the Poetry Editor for the Aspiring Writers’ Society.