MY MOTHER’S DIARY

I walk the same street I used to walk in my childhood,
God, back then poverty had already tore its hand into the bodies of
men,
forever branding their paths through life… You know, I have piously
prayed for others just like I prayed for myself, I wanted to breathe lightly
for a few times, just so I would for once have something for
myself…
But even my mother used to say: “Pleasure is not
for people like us; we wear the mark of
poverty
all the way to our grave.” Shall I ever forget that
eternally blissful smile when she said those
words? How it lured one to be
good
and humble. In my memories, I shall always live with this
street, from which that careless joy was blooming…
I lived for that smile, and it was for that smile I swallowed down
so much bitter anger… Oh, God, if that smile would
still echo down the street of my childhood…
But now that smile cut into the entrails
of the oblique night, and she was still standing there,
in the same place where she stood
pensively watching me leaving the street of my
childhood,
she looked at that same yellow soil, as if she wanted to
shake all the poverty out of it.
I lived for the chance to hear her light laughter again…
For that laughter, I have spent many a long night traveling
third-class… And then I saw her, and she was singing
the same sad song from the blue and gold diary,
which was veiled by thick white curtains.
God, what kind of force from the depth of the soul is it that drives the
memories
to sing that sad song, from the heart, in that
street?
And the last word of the song withered, and she withered
with her hand on the diary and her lip on the song. That smile
was forlorn, as was my life. But as my late mother used to say:
“Pleasure is not for people like us.”