STATUE WEEPS
GEORGE MOSES
If statues can weep,
the garlanded Mother Indira
with her deep maternal wound
would have screamed aloud
witnessing her first-born
shattered by a vily garlander’s
concealed plastic bomb.
The lamentation of Mother Indira
would have rent the skies
echoed and re-echoed from Himalayas to Cape,
like the lamentation of the mothers,
when Herod massacred the innocent
first-born babes in Judea.
To gather dark clouds o’er the globe.
If statues can move,
the bereaved mother would have
from her pedestal jumped, collected your mortal remains
and laid you across
her maternal lap,
shed her maternal tears
and stir’d the world to mourn.
Were I a Michael Angelo,
I would chisel her in marble
with Rajiv laid across her lap
like that sad statue of Mother Mary in Rome
to instal it in Delhi
for tourists to gaze and weep.
A monument of
The Mother in distress.
Note: The late leader garlanded the statue of his great mother in the vicinity just before his ghastly assassination.