Before the matchmaker braided our fates
Appa was a romantic, she tells me,
a would-be Jesuit priest—long past now

but some mornings, house dormant, I find him
genuflecting on the tile floor meeting
God in the garden of Gethsemane,
his face a passing agony over
old selves sown on fallow soil, washed ashore

in book gutters hiding black and white prints
of soldier silhouettes, shape of my father
with a lopsided helmet, outsized boots
crunching through frost fields lit by gunpowder
moons hung above a trail of sleepless men—

Tell me what kept you awake all those nights.