Poem ‘Jai Shri Mataji’ by Alan Wherry

"Houl' yer wisht" my granny said
When I asked her where me mammy was
Or sometimes "She's run off with a sailor"
A toddler's mind never knew what that meant.

Once a girl in our street said,
"Alan Wherry, you've got sleekit eyes like a Fenian."
I wondered if she knew the derivation of sleekit.
Or what a Fenian was?

There was grace in them and in what they said
And how they were, elemental fused with love
In a stocking granny drowned newborn kittens
Her aul' tabby looking on from the top of the back yard wall.

Whoever would have thought I'd get Self-realized
All part of the divine being.
My aunt Annie knew and said of me
"He was one of us, but different, he was in his own way."

Sahaj love at Krasni Ploshchad
Synecdoche on a sunny September day
Ananya, permanence, devotion to a wife to be
Spiritually more evolved than me.