The Parrot-Crow

Recently in her seventies
(while house hunting)
Mama deemed the day inauspicious
when an omen, as it flies,
braced her holy head

So, I now confess that lie
of my childhood, when
I sheltered a fledgling crow
in the name of a parrot:
When asked why

its beak wasn’t red, or aquiline
like her favourite poet’s,
I swore it broke
against the skin of an unripe
mango

Then what about its coat,
black like her lawyer
Father’s when summoned
To court? Ask it to say
‘sweet’, ‘fruit’, ‘boat’…

Oh stop!
I moaned, it’s no perjury!

It tipped the old maid’s
hair-dye so unkind to green—
this bird is so ill now
that all the English it speaks
now sounds like Tamil…

And by your own comparison
To Telugu, all the Tamil you hear
sounds like a crow!