Sarala depicts the agony of aged parents who are forgotten in old age homes, in this poem, exclusively for Different Truths.

The love we keep in our mind is tight-lided at times

Ego the demon is the reason

Killing the pure love

We nourished and grew!

Somewhere sometime

That dreadful weed

Caught and crushed the

Sublime love till it became just a sad story of lives!

Old parents are pushed into

Old age homes without any care not remembering the way they worked day and night without a morsel

They just ate puffed rice and water to fill their hunger

Giving the children the best, they could!

As they grew up many became selfish spending money on vanity fare forgetting the old parents

Quietly weeping, leading lonely lives thinking of the gone past years!

Their feet were caught up

By the dreaded weed… vanity… to show the world the status they reached without divulging their parents’ plight!

Discos and drinks became regular and cigarettes every minute they light as if they are lighting the divine diya on the altar of God!

They have become money minded and running after fake lifestyle at the cost of the tears shed by the old parents, still with lot of love in their heart … not knowing how to hate their children!

Let’s all pray a change will take placing and these so-called vanity dies a sad death!

©Sarala Balachandran

Photos from the Internet