When

the world tumbles down, home is the only heaven

or enough earth to place our feet. Mother says,

gather around children and starts telling us how

she birthed me- her first son, laying in a cot under a

leaking roof as the old midwife, half blind with the

burden of her own age chanted, push push push.

She said she didn’t do what she had been told, instead

she prayed, Bhagwan let me keep this child for myself

and held me in the warmth of her womb for as long as

her body allowed. Greed is one of the seven sins

and mother didn’t hesitate to lick it because

she had been told, a child is his mother’s only for

nine months before father comes to claim him.

So praying was the only trick but when has divinity

ever given women anything to keep and soon I crawled

out of her clutches and into the claws of the world.

She said the cry of a woman at birth is similar to the

tears shed at a funeral- both the by-product of loss.

With rain in her eyes, she saw the multiple possibilities

that could kill a child- their own negligence,

their poverty, snakes or scorpions, age or disease

and she was sure when she didn’t hear me cry

that if nothing else, then gods themselves.

As the world outside burns and birds lift in the

darkened sky, she agrees how unplaced her fears were,

how she didn’t have to worry about her rights

on something she birthed because even gods know,

before a child is his father’s son, he was a wish,

a prayer on his mother’s tongue.

Ashish Kumar Singh (he/him) is a queer poet from India and a postgraduate student of English literature. Other than writing, he reads and sleeps extensively. Previously, his works have appeared -or are forthcoming- in Chestnut Review, 14poems, Mason Jar Press, Native Skin, Tab Journal, Blue Marble Review, Trampset and elsewhere.