The woman who was small not because the world expanded.
The elephants came out from the fields
and carried me toward Chambak, toward a village doused
in fires so that in the pond fish had fried,
and looking at that dead water was
a woman I had seen running home each evening
with a bucket in her hand.
Always her speed was the hair that flew in my face.
Always her feet sounding of tanks
which made dogs bark and flee, footprints deep
as trenches in the grass.
This is the woman who has shrunk so small when the planes came
nobody could ever find her, and since more planes,
she stayed as small as a spoon.
And the world seemed to enlarge though nothing had changed,
and when she saw me she hid, threw pebbles at my ankles
until I bowed down and easily picked her up,
folding her inside a banana leaf.
She slept.
She slept well.
She, who is my mother, sleeping off the world again,
whose person I hold in my hand when she wants to be held.