Sunday Mornings (with Pakistani Women)
Most of my poetry is about my life. This is about my experience volunteering at the Association of Pakistani Physicians of North America (APPNA) free health clinic. Yay.
He spends every Sunday morning in a white box of charity
When he should be worshipping God
He spends it with the people of partitioned India
But they are not like him
He floats and files through the hours
With occasional uncomfortable conversation with patients
Who are so vulgar and so voluble and so very alive
And he refuses to be like them
And he wonders why he persists
And he hopes it is not for the shallow and
Futile reasons he presumes it to be
He hopes that the experience will have
A sort of spiritual worth, absurdly
And the realization afflicts him
As he clutches the pale, tan folder
Penned in sharpie on the tab is a name
Hispanic, escapes him now
Scrawled hurriedly on the front is
Quiet for a moment, not melancholy
Marryam’s little cousins scamper behind the counter
Watching, he feels an envious nostalgia
Still have no idea how to format things properly.
