Squirrel

It is after the room-mates
Have gone to sleep
After dinner, gossip,
Jokes and laughter
That the night turns sick
Voices from home
Despite the distance drift in
Father sitting in the front-yard
Asks mother if I have had my meals
While my sister misses no detail
Of what her classmates
Were up to in college
It is so like
A half-remembered dream
From a different life
That I know
The idyll is slipping away
And soon it can never be
It is like the squirrel
We nurtured like a child
During the storm
And abandoned when we left
The cyclone-prone town.