My Mother Asked Me To Write This Poem

For Soni Prashad, 1929-2020

The dead retain a punctual courtesy.
They write when headlines fail to make much sense.
This morning yours arrived with tea-stained edges,
the envelope addressed in careful tense.

Hi son, can you tell me why the Israelis
are planning to take over such a large part of...
what is it again... the paper’s rather smudged...
East Jerusalem?

The rain had blurred the proper nouns, not history.
Names disappear more quickly than the stones.
Maps are revised by rulers at their desks;
the olive tree still memorises bones.

It’s the occupation, Ma.
They simply won’t relent.

I wrote the words as one reports the weather,
ashamed that habit made them sound so plain,
as though endurance were a natural season,
like Calcutta’s heat or monsoon’s patient rain.

Your answer crossed the silence without postage.

Well, it is outrageous.
What are you going to do about it?

The living are ingenious in delay.
We polish arguments, revise the facts,
mistake our measured conscience for a movement,
our sentences for necessary acts.

I suspect I’ll write something.

The room grew still. The windows faced the evening.
Beyond them, blackbirds rehearsed their ancient art,
stitching brief freedoms through the darkening air,
while somewhere soldiers measured out a heart.

Then came your final line, almost domestic,
the sort of thing you always used to say
before the kettle sang, before the dishes,
before another ordinary day:

Send it to me as soon as you do.

So here it is.
Not because poems halt a bulldozer,
or shame a minister from borrowed land,
but because silence signs too many papers
and calls its folded helplessness ‘the plan’.

If there is any postal route to heaven,
it cannot run by hafrada’s checkpoint gate.
Still, mothers have a way of getting letters
long after every clerk has stamped them Late.

Read this, then, where no borders need defending.
Read slowly, as you always read my lines.
And if the dead still keep the living honest,
return it with your margin full of signs.

London,
13 July 2026.