Taking Over

Taking Over

She lay still on the kitchen floor.
He came to see why dinner wasn't announced.

The girl twirled in a new dress in her room; the door locked from inside. 
The boy, intent on his laptop, won game after game.

Nothing moved for a while,
no one too.

It made little difference to them
and none perhaps to her.

Inconvenient as death is, yet it is a full stop.
An illness kills time, money and patience,
especially when there is no love.

The kitchen was washed,
Prayers chanted,
a homely enough photograph found, garlanded.

The next week, a maid cooked their favourite biriyani,
 stepping over the memory of the fallen body.

Reena R. lives in Sharjah, United Arab Emirates. She has co-edited two anthologies and is a practicing poet.