Siren and the Shattered Mirror

Kasturi Biswas

Fanny walks back to the rented basement, shivering in the cold
It is getting dark now; New England winters, bold. 
She left her heart in her homeland, where her mother stays alone. 
This is workplace, she couldn't call it home.
For last two and a half years, she is longing to go home.

Fanny is a frontline warrior, a title pandemic bestowed.
She saw people struggling to breathe and then life slowly losing its grip.
Every day, it was an endless string of death reports.
Too tired to focus on vitals, charts, and scans anymore!

Then, the vaccines came; science was about to take over the viral war
Hopefully, the most coveted 'normalcy' was not so far.
All over the world,
Under the blue sky amongst the golden wheat field back in her home.
But instead, she heard a siren over the phone.

Fanny could not believe,
Just out of a pandemic and the humanity walking straight into a war.
What looked like a nightmare is now reality, 
Thanks to the Tzar!

She kept calling, until her mother's phone went dead.
Fanny saw deaths so close but till this moment she never felt
This could be their last call.
The last sound she heard was of a shattered mirror and her mother's free fall. 

Kasturi Biswas is a fourth year graduate student from India in Francis laboratory in Dept. of Neurobiology, Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences working with aging and oxidative stress. She is an avid non fiction reader and tries her hand sometimes to jot down her thoughts.This piece was awarded Honorable Mention in the 18th Annual Gerald F. Berlin Creative Awards.