Ode To Mother Poem by Debasis Chatterjee

Mother is the Creator,
Mother is the Earth,
Mother is the Birth,
The all Pervasive Protector.

My birth-mother is no more;
But I feel her in my soul
In my strength, in my yearnings,
In bliss, in her spiritual role,
To keep me in her sustained blessings.

Lucky I am, her son, her offspring,
Shared her immense learning,
Assimilated her endless loving
Care, knowledge and values
And her guiding virtues.

Unlucky am I, lots remained to be done
In my care, my nursing, in being enough kind
During her last days, mingled with
My confused ignorance and flustered mind.

I was not there at her last moment,
Work, persistent and maddening work kept me away
From her the last minute;
Unaware till today if she when stillness of the final dark night
Stormed over her looked for me, my wife, her grand kids…
To remain shrouded forever, these thoughts hurricane through me
When alone at night, I myself look on up at the ceiling,
Betwixt the mystic world of darkness and light.

Perhaps, in the midst of darkening death surrounding
In her solitary loneliness, long illness her ravaging,
Absented by her son, own relations,
She started off on her journey to the Land of Supreme Felicitude,
Where meet Life and Death amid Creations and Destructions,
In the eternal clash of extreme affliction and final Beatitude.

She led us, glorifying her life, head and mind high,
Creating in her earth life a harmony,
That through turbulent world of which the next generation
Could generate their life's symphony,
Could glide through without a sigh.


- (January 2017, Kolkata, India)