! ! Parents (Like, Who Needs Them?) Poem by Michael Shepherd

In the staff room after Parents’ Day
we used to shake our prematurely
gray heads and contemplate
the Zen-ness of our well-worn truism:
‘Parents are the least suitable
people to have children’…

EMForster said, we begin by
loving our parents; later
we judge them; rarely
if ever, do we forgive them..

The other day, some pseudo-quiz
for exposure-hungry celebs
asked, what is the most disliked
thing about parents?

and the pollsters did their thing
and found it was, their taste in music..
I guess that tells you something
about the depth of culture

though I suspect many teenagers
really think, it’s the gross, unspeakable way
that they go on having sex after we’re born…

however, this alleged poem is getting
way off track from its solemn message
which might, just might, be India’s
greatest if unproveable gift to the West
and all who whinge about their parents and
what they did and didn’t do for us…:

karma: that the way you lived your previous life
fixed it via the absolute computer that
you were born in the most propitious
time and place and parentage
to continue the journey of your soul
on its way to the bliss of freedom
from all worldly attachments
such as, e.g. parents; older siblings; and
the rest you’ll have to fill in for yourself

remembering of course in your compassion that
it was karma for your long-suffering parents too;
you were their justice; and they, yours..