This piece is part of the Mehfil folio, which features original art by Jasjyot Singh Hans.

for my grandmother 

You collected fallen petals from a rose 
in West Virginia, clad in sari pink of rose. 

You didn’t have the English to ask permission from our neighbors.
Our neighbors’ bush, our neighbors’ fence, our neighbors’ rose. 

What had fallen on this side of the fence, you reasoned, was yours,
for your gods, fresh garlands, you’d sew of marigold and rose. 

Your meticulous altar a reminder of your lost world;
your statues, your prayer beads, your deities in careful rows. 

Did they tell the truth, wise Shakespeare and Stein, those years ago?
Would by any other name it smell as sweet? Is a rose a rose? 

Or does it matter the language, the color, the country, the word?
Is there a there there? By the Arabian Sea: a rose. 

How ashamed I was of you in white America. 
To that mean, scared younger self, I offer a white rose. 

Still, I shunned you, failed to hear through you my past.
Lost lessons, stories, scattered petals from a rose. 

Years later, I’m aware my own trespasses, ever so slightly,
onto stoop or yard to steal the scent of a neighbor’s rose. 

Aware, as well, the dangers of trespassing while brown.
In “post-racial America” (ha!), my glasses are not tinted rose. 

Your ghost whispers to me in a language I’m trying to learn.
To you I raise my glass—late May, rosé. 

Trying to learn, too, from Rumi and Hafiz, the art of unforgetting.
I must answer for myself: What was lost? And what, Rahul, arose?

“Ghazal” from Feeding the Ghosts: Poems. Copyright © 2024 by Rahul Mehta. Used with the permission of the University Press of Kentucky.