Waiting for my Parents When I was Ten

I was working on new characters,

trying to solve how each stroke flowed

into another, and how one half of a word

might sound different than the whole.

A quiet evening. A candle

waggled its ruthless tongue.

my grandma sat in the penumbra;

her dexterous fingers looped

yarn on two bamboo needles.

Coal was not enough to keep us warm.

My hand grew cold

from pressing hard into the pencil,

whose graphite crushed, a black

trail on paper, zigzagging

like the road my parents took everyday

up the mountains. They hadn’t returned.

I hadn’t learnt

to express big ideas, but I remembered

absence threading like white hair

on grandma’s head, more each day.

Outside, the night howled.

They were not coming back.