It is fitting that my grandfather should die tonight,

How convenient that this is the very moment I have nightmared about

My God prepared me for this inevitable loss, perhaps if I saw it happen enough times

My dreams awoke to sweaty tears and whispered pleas for his health many a shadowy nights

Always I am within a plane’s reach and barely arrive to witness his body lowered into the soil

Others we exchange prolonged goodbyes until sleep claims him as earth does water in drought

I once orated his entire eulogy in Urdu, a language unbeknownst to me

There was no coincidence in the disturbing peace I felt when at 11:30 the phone blared bright

He is my ancestor now, joining the other kings of Persia in the stars and desert winds

I’d like to think I lost someone important to me, but truthfully it is the world which now has a hole

The waves crash with a little less vigor, thoroughly out of sync with the moon

I’d like to say my Dadi recently lost her husband, fact is he was gone that cursed interim  

The day they strapped him to the silver chair and stripped him of dignity

Perhaps from time to time his soul apparated, yet wasn’t long before Allah beckoned

Bringing the entirety of his most coveted, stubborn, and brave seraphim  

It might be unreasonable to have wanted more time with the most intelligent person of my family

Especially since it meant prolonging his pain, but then again

I am a very selfish woman, I am also an exemplary failure at expressing affection, I think guiltily

Mourning becomes none, not Electra, not Hamlet and least of all on the contours of father’s face

The one that so perfectly parallels that of his father, must be DNA’s personal vendetta

It is fitting that my preferred movie is entitled Kal Ho Naa Ho: Tomorrow Might Never Be

It is fitting that a devout Catholic should find themselves almost prostrate & facing Mecca

Begging to a foreign god in Mohammed’s tongue to save a man I’d only seen twice in memory

It is odd however that I should attend a funeral